Precipitation response to extreme soil moisture conditions over the Mediterranean
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Precipitation response to extreme soil moisture conditions over the Mediterranean Constantin Ardilouze1 · Stefano Materia2 · Lauriane Batté1 · Marianna Benassi2 · Chloé Prodhomme1,3,4 Received: 23 July 2020 / Accepted: 30 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The intimate link between soil moisture and precipitation makes it a “chicken-and-egg situation” that challenges climate studies of the continental water cycle. This association is particularly acute over the Mediterranean, increasingly exposed to droughts with climate change. This study aims at deciphering the impact of spring soil moisture state in the Mediterranean on subsequent warm season precipitation. In an idealized setup, two distinct climate models are used to generate extreme dry or wet soil conditions, and run climate simulations initialized and/or forced by these conditions. Changes in precipitation distribution and persistence are analyzed and where applicable compared to composites from a reanalysis. Spring soil moisture anomalies are found to be very persistent, but the precipitation response is largely model dependent. Overall, dry soils lead to a reduction of precipitation for early summer months and conversely for wet soils although with a fainter and less robust signal. On the other hand, wet soils tend to favor the persistence of precipitation throughout summer over several sub-regions. Our results highlight the stringent need to reduce the wide array of uncertainties associated to soil moisture, land-atmosphere coupling and convection in climate models, before ascertaining that soil moisture initialization could provide more skillful sub-seasonal to seasonal precipitation prediction. Keywords Soil moisture · Precipitation · Mediterranean · Land-atmosphere coupling
1 Introduction Despite large uncertainties across the globe, the Mediterranean area is one of the few where climate projections consistently foresee an increased frequency of soil moisture and precipitation droughts (Orlowsky and Seneviratne 2013). Seneviratne et al. (2013) also identify that the precipitation regime of this region is particularly sensitive to Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-020-05519-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Constantin Ardilouze [email protected] 1
CNRM, Université de Toulouse, Météo France, CNRS, Toulouse, France
2
Fondazione Centro-Euro Mediterraneo sui Cambiamenti Climatici (CMCC), Bologna, Italy
3
Group of Meteorology, Universitat de Barcelona (UB), Barcelona, Spain
4
Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Barcelona, Spain
projected changes in soil moisture at the end of the century. In present climate, results from the multi-model exercise GLACE (Global Land Atmosphere Coupling Experiment, Koster et al. 2004; Seneviratne et al. 2006) have spotted the Mediterranean as a region combining a relatively high soil moisture memory with intense land-atmosphere coupling. Given these features, seasonal p
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