In a paper recently published in Journal of Climate, Dr. Hongsheng Wang and Dr. Esther Mullens develop a geospatial climatology of landfalling atmospheric rivers using 8-decades of data from the European Center’s ERA5 reanalysis dataset.
Using a detection algorithm to extract atmospheric river features, the authors develop a severity climatology that is adjusted to reflect the climatology of water vapor over several United States subdomains.
Their key findings reveal that damaging (or ‘major’) atmospheric river events are increasing across all domains, while weaker (or ‘minor’) events are either staying stable or declining, and this is attributed to the global increase in water vapor associated with warming temperatures.
Moreover, there is a generally weaker relationship across each domain in aggregate between rain rates and atmospheric river peak severity, with the duration of the event playing a larger role in overall severity.
The paper also identifies changes in the genesis regions of atmospheric rivers between minor and major events, identifying some consistent differences for some landfalling subdomains.
These results can be useful to water managers in assessing their baseline risk of damaging ARs and trends in time.
Wang, H., & Mullens, E. D. (2025). A Climatology of Atmospheric River Severity Using an Adjusted IVT Scaling across US Subdomains. Journal of Climate, 38(24), 7269-7284.
Photo by Raychel Sanner on Unsplash.