posted on 2018-02-05, 11:44authored byTom Matthews, Conor Murphy, Gerard McCarthy, Ciaran Broderick, Robert WilbyRobert Wilby
‘Super’ Storm Desmond broke meteorological and hydrological records during a record warm year in the British–Irish Isles (BI). The severity of the storm may be a harbinger of expected changes to regional hydroclimate as global temperatures continue to rise. Here, we adopt a process-based approach to investigate the potency of Desmond, and explore the extent to which climate change may have been a contributory factor. Through an Eulerian assessment of water vapour flux we determine that Desmond was accompanied by an atmospheric river (AR) of severity unprecedented since at least 1979, on account of both high atmospheric humidity and high wind speeds. Lagrangian air-parcel tracking and moisture attribution techniques show that long-term warming of North Atlantic sea surface temperatures has significantly increased the chance of such high humidity in ARs in the vicinity of the BI. We conclude that, given exactly the same dynamical conditions associated with Desmond, the likelihood of such an intense AR has already increased by 25% due to long-term climate change. However, our analysis represents a first-order assessment, and further research is needed into the controls influencing AR dynamics.
Funding
Conor Murphy was funded by the Irish Environmental Protection Agency under project 2014 CCRP-MS.16.
History
Department
Geography and Environment
Published in
Environmental Research Letters
Volume
13
Issue
1
Citation
MATTHEWS, T.K.R. ... et al, 2018. Super Storm Desmond: a process-based assessment. Environmental Research Letters, 13 (1), 014024.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Acceptance date
2017-11-07
Publication date
2018-01-18
Copyright date
2018
Notes
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by IOP Publishing Ltd under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/