Title: “Continuing Studies of Cool- and Warm-Season Precipitation Events over the Northeastern United States”
Past research has indicated that reconfigurations of large-scale flow regimes can alter regional weather patterns due to shifts in storm tracks and associated eddy transports of heat, momentum, and vorticity. Conventional wisdom also suggests that high-impact weather events tend to occur during larg...
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Format: | Text |
Language: | English |
Published: |
2005
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Online Access: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.666.3957 http://cstar.cestm.albany.edu/CSTAR_docs/CSTAR+10-21-05.pdf |
Summary: | Past research has indicated that reconfigurations of large-scale flow regimes can alter regional weather patterns due to shifts in storm tracks and associated eddy transports of heat, momentum, and vorticity. Conventional wisdom also suggests that high-impact weather events tend to occur during large-scale regime transitions. Motivated by these considerations, this research investigates relationships between large-scale regime transitions and Northeast precipitation in the cool season (November–April) from a statistical and synoptic perspective. In this study, a regime transition is defined as a two-standard-deviation change centered on zero in the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) index or Pacific/North American (PNA) pattern index over a seven-day period. To identify regime transitions, a 56-year database (1948–2003) of daily NAO and PNA indices was generated from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP)–National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) reanalysis dataset. A daily precipitation anomaly database for the Northeast was derived from the Unified Precipitation Dataset (UPD) for the same 56-year period. Key statistical results indicate that transitions from positive to negative NAO regimes and from negative to positive PNA regimes are associated with enhanced precipitation in the Northeast. |
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