Intensification of Summer Rainfall Variability in the Southeastern United States during Recent Decades

Intensification of Summer Rainfall Variability in the Southeastern United States during Recent Decades

The variability of summer precipitation in the southeastern United States is examined in this study using 60-yr (1948–2007) rainfall data. The Southeast summer rainfalls exhibited higher interannual variability with more intense summer droughts and anomalous wetness in the recent 30 years (1978–2007) than in the prior 30 years (1948–77). Such intensification of summer rainfall variability was c...

Changes to the North Atlantic Subtropical High and Its Role in the Intensification of Summer Rainfall Variability in the Southeastern United States

This study investigates the changes of the North Atlantic subtropical high (NASH) and its impact on summer precipitation over the southeastern (SE) United States using the 850-hPa geopotential height field in the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) reanalysis, the 40-yr European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Re-Analysis (ERA-40), long-term rainfall data, and...

Reply to ‘‘Comments on ‘Changes to the North Atlantic Subtropical High and Its Role in the Intensification of Summer Rainfall Variability in the Southeastern United States’’’

Recently Diem questioned the western ridge movement of the North Atlantic subtropical high (NASH) reported in a 2011 paper of Li et al. This reply shows more analysis that further strengthens the conclusions originally put forth by Li et al. Diem’s analysis of the trend in the western ridge of theNASHwas based on the data over a 30-yr period (1978–2007), whereas the main conclusions in Li et al...

Interannual relationships between Indian Summer Monsoon and Indo-Pacific coupled modes of variability during recent decades

Forward modeling of regional scale tree-ring patterns in the southeastern United States and the recent influence of summer drought

[1] We use a mechanistic model of tree-ring formation to simulate regional patterns of climate-tree growth relationships in the southeastern United States. Modeled chronologies are consistent with actual tree-ring data, demonstrating that our simulations have skill in reproducing broad-scale patterns of the proxy’s response to climate variability. The model predicts that a decrease in summer pr...