- 1Center For Western Weather and Water Extremes (CW3E) Scripps Institution of Oceanography University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, United States of America (eslinskey@ucsd.edu)
- 2Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science and Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA
- 3Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA
The U.S. National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) is sponsoring development of an atmospheric river (AR) climate data record (CDR) to serve as a valuable resource for the scientific, water management, and decision-making communities across the Western US (and soon, globally). The CDR uses a novel combination of two techniques: (1) the AR Scale, which broadly characterizes the AR strength from 1-5 based on the peak integrated water vapor transport (IVT) and duration of AR conditions (i.e., IVT ≥ 250 kg m-1 s-1) at a given location, and (2) the tARget algorithm–a tool that uses climatological, geometric, and directional thresholds to identify ARs. Since the AR scale has no geometric criteria (and thus ranks non-AR events such as tropical cyclones, cutoff lows, and monsoons) and tARget does not provide characterization of AR strength, these two methods complement each other, with AR Scale-identified events “filtered” by tARget. This presentation highlights the resulting data and effects of this “filtering” through selected cases, long-term climatology, and interannual variability across various global regions. In addition, we explore attribution of precipitation to AR events identified in the CDR. All historical atmospheric data is sourced from the ERA5 reanalysis.
How to cite: Slinskey, E., Rutz, J., Guan, B., and Ralph, F. M.: The NCEI Climate Data Record for Atmospheric Rivers: Initial Results over the Western United States, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-6689, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-6689, 2025.
