Abstract
Following an earlier climatological study of North Pacific Polar Lows by employing dynamical downscaling of NCEP1 reanalysis in the regional climate model COSMO-CLM, the characteristics of Polar Low genesis over the North Pacific under different global warming scenarios are investigated. Simulations based on three scenarios from the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios were conducted using a global climate model (ECHAM5) and used to examine systematic changes in the occurrence of Polar Lows over the twenty first century. The results show that with more greenhouse gas emissions, global air temperature would rise, and the frequency of Polar Lows would decrease. With sea ice melting, the distribution of Polar Low genesis shows a northward shift. In the scenarios with stronger warming there is a larger reduction in the number of Polar Lows.
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Acknowledgments
This work is a contribution to the Helmholtz Climate Initiative REKLIM (Regional Climate Change), a joint research project of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centers. We acknowledge the modeling groups, the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI) and the WCRP’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling (WGCM) for their roles in making available the WCRP CMIP3 multi-model datasets. Support of these datasets is provided by the Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy. The authors thank Beate Gardeike for preparing the diagrams. The technical and scientific support, and various comments and suggestions by Dr. Beate Geyer and Dr. Matthias Zahn have greatly improved this manuscript. This research was supported by the Chinese Scholarship Council (CSC), and by the Knowledge Innovation Project for Distinguished Young Scholar of The Chinese Academy of Sciences (No. KZCX2-EW-QN203).
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Chen, F., von Storch, H., Zeng, L. et al. Polar Low genesis over the North Pacific under different global warming scenarios. Clim Dyn 43, 3449–3456 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-014-2117-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-014-2117-5