Estimating the temporal domain when the discount of the net evaporation term affects the resulting net precipitation pattern in the moisture budget using a 3-D Lagrangian approach

PLoS One. 2014 Jun 3;9(6):e99046. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0099046. eCollection 2014.

Abstract

The Lagrangian FLEXPART model has been used during the last decade to detect moisture sources that affect the climate in different regions of the world. While most of these studies provided a climatological perspective on the atmospheric branch of the hydrological cycle in terms of precipitation, none assessed the minimum temporal domain for which the climatological approach is valid. The methodology identifies the contribution of humidity to the moisture budget in a region by computing the changes in specific humidity along backward (or forward) trajectories of air masses over a period of ten days beforehand (afterwards), thereby allowing the calculation of monthly, seasonal and annual averages. The current study calculates as an example the climatological seasonal mean and variance of the net precipitation for regions in which precipitation exceeds evaporation (E-P<0) for the North Atlantic moisture source region using different time periods, for winter and summer from 1980 to 2000. The results show that net evaporation (E-P>0) can be discounted after when the integration of E-P is done without affecting the general net precipitation patterns when it is discounted in a monthly or longer time scale.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Climate
  • Environmental Monitoring
  • Fresh Water / chemistry*
  • Geological Phenomena
  • Models, Theoretical*
  • Seasons

Grants and funding

The authors would like to thank the “Xunta de Galicia” for partially funding this research through the CHEGA project (INCITE09.383.278) and the Spanish Ministry responsible for Science for its contribution through the TRAMO project (CGL2012-35485), both of which were cofunded by FEDER. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.