Quantifying the contribution of atmospheric  circulation to precipitation variability and  changes in the US Great Plains and southwest  using self-organizing map–analogue

Zhuang, Yizhou; Fu, Rong

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-24-1641-2024

Articles | Volume 24, issue 3

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-24-1641-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-24-1641-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 24, issue 3

Research article

|

06 Feb 2024

Research article |

| 06 Feb 2024

Quantifying the contribution of atmospheric circulation to precipitation variability and changes in the US Great Plains and southwest using self-organizing map–analogue

Yizhou Zhuang and Rong Fu

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-24-1641-2024-supplement

Data sets

Complete ERA5 from 1940: Fifth generation of ECMWF atmospheric reanalyses of the global climate H. Hersbach et al. https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.143582cf

CPC Unified Gauge-Based Analysis of Daily Precipitation over CONUS M. Chen and P. Xie https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.unified.daily.conus.html

Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) National Center for Environmental Information https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/pdo/

Model code and software

SOM-Toolbox T. Vatanen https://github.com/ilarinieminen/SOM-Toolbox

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Short summary

This study investigated how atmospheric circulation affects precipitation variability and changes in the US Great Plains (GP) and southwest (SW). By developing a new method called self organizing map–analogue, we found that circulation significantly influences short-term precipitation variability, accounting for 54 %–61 % of the total variance. Furthermore, circulation contributes considerably to the multi-decadal changes in precipitation and its extremes, especially for the southern GP and SW.