Observability of moisture transport divergence in Arctic atmospheric rivers by dropsondes

• Published in: Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics
• Main Authors: H. Dorff, H. Konow, V. Schemann, F. Ament
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Copernicus Publications 2024
• Subjects: Physics; QC1-999; Chemistry; QD1-999; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-24-8771-2024; https://doaj.org/article/ca141fa97e444766ae07f5fdabeedab3

This study emulates dropsondes to elucidate the extent to which sporadic airborne sondes adequately represent divergence of moisture transport in Arctic atmospheric rivers (ARs). The convergence of vertically integrated moisture transport ( IVT ) plays a crucial role as it favours precipitation that significantly affects Arctic sea ice properties. Long-range research aircraft can transect ARs and drop sondes to determine their IVT divergence. In order to assess the representativeness of future sonde-based IVT divergence in Arctic ARs, we disentangle the sonde-based deviations from an ideal instantaneous IVT divergence, which result from undersampling by a limited number of sondes and from the flight duration. Our synthetic study uses C3S Arctic Regional Reanalysis (CARRA) reanalyses to set up an idealised scenario for airborne AR observations. For nine Arctic spring ARs, we mimic flights transecting each AR in CARRA and emulate sonde-based IVT representation by picking single vertical profiles. The emulation quantifies IVT divergence observability by two approaches. First, sonde-based IVT and its divergence are compared to the continuous IVT interpolated onto the flight cross-section. The comparison specifies uncertainties of discrete sonde-based IVT variability and divergence. Second, we determine how temporal AR evolution affects IVT divergence values by contrasting time-propagating sonde-based values with the divergence based on instantaneous snapshots. For our Arctic AR cross-sections, we find that coherent wind and moisture variabilities contribute less than 10 % to the total transport. Both quantities are uncorrelated to a great extent. Moisture turns out to be the more variable quantity. We show that sounding spacing greater than 100 km results in errors greater than 10 % of the total IVT along AR cross-sections. For IVT divergence, the Arctic ARs exhibit similar differences in moisture advection and mass convergence across the embedded front as mid-latitude ARs, but we identify moisture advection as ...