Constraining Atmospheric River Uncertainty Using Instantaneous Poleward Latent Heat Transport

Abstract: Atmospheric rivers (ARs) are extreme weather events that play a crucial role in the global hydrological cycle. As a key mechanism of latent heat transport (LHT), they help maintain energy balance in the climate system. While an AR is characterized by a long, narrow corridor of water vapor associated with a low-level jet stream, there is no unambiguous definition of an AR grounded in geophysical fluid dynamics. Therefore, AR identification is currently performed by a large array of expert-defined, threshold-based algorithms. The variety of algorithms introduces uncertainty in the estimated contribution of ARs to LHT. We calculate the instantaneous eddy LHT from moist, poleward anomalies. Based on the dynamics of the large-scale atmospheric circulation, this quantity is a physics-based upper bound that constrains AR projections from the variety of detection algorithms. We quantify the contribution of ARs to transient eddies, stationary eddies, and transient-stationary eddy interactions, and we show the relative contribution of ARs and other processes, such as dry, equatorward transport. We use this upper bound to quantify ARs' frequency, intensity, and temporal variability. In the historical climate, we find that ARs transport 2.21 PW at the latitude of peak meridional transport in Northern Hemisphere winter, with approximately 0.47 PW of temporal variability. By the end of the century in a future climate projection, at this latitude, we find that AR-induced LHT will increase by 0.5 PW and the corresponding temporal variability will increase by 0.14 PW.