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On a hemispheric scale, it is now well established that stratospheric ozone depletion has been the principal driver of externally forced atmospheric circulation changes south of the Equator in the last decades of the 20th Century. The impact of ozone depletion has been felt over the entire hemisphere, as reflected in the poleward drift of the midlatitude jet, the southward expansion of the summertime Hadley cell and accompanying precipitation trends deep into the subtropics. On a regional scale, however, surface impacts directly attributable to ozone depletion have yet to be identified. In this paper we focus on South Eastern South America (SESA), a region that has exhibited one of the largest wetting trends during the 20th Century. We study the impact of ozone depletion on SESA precipitation using output from 6 different climate models, spanning a wide range of complexity. In all cases we contrast pairs of model integrations with and without ozone depletion, but with all other forcings identically specified. This allows for unambiguous attribution of the computed precipitation trends. All 6 climate models consistently reveal that stratospheric ozone depletion results in a significant wetting of SESA over the period 1960-1999. Taken as a whole, these model results strongly suggest that the impact of ozone depletion on SESA precipitation has been as large as, and quite possibly larger than, the one caused by increasing greenhouse gases over the same period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global impacts of El Niño on precipitation have been long‐recognized, but more understanding of the mechanisms behind this influence is needed. For instance, previous studies have largely overlooked the potential impacts of El Niño on terrestrial moisture recycling (TMR). We perform a 40‐year forward tracking simulation to derive a global climatology of recycled precipitation and use a composite analysis to investigate how El Niño affects TMR. We identify seven regions where the El Niño impact on TMR is most significant and find that, in these regions, changes in precipitation and TMR are directly related: they increase or decrease together. In addition, we find a marked latitudinal contrast between the Southern Hemisphere, where TMR increases during El Niño, and the Northern Hemisphere and the tropics, where it decreases. Our results indicate that the weakening and strengthening of TMR can be behind precipitation changes caused by El Niño globally. Plain Language Summary: El Niño is recognized as a climate variability phenomenon with significant impacts on precipitation worldwide. However, the mechanisms behind these impacts are not fully understood. Here we use model simulations to argue that one of those mechanisms is the effect of El Niño on terrestrial moisture recycling (TMR), that is, the fraction of precipitation fed by atmospheric moisture originating not in the ocean but on the continents. We show that El Niño significantly affects TMR globally, especially in seven regions of South America, Africa, North America, Europe, and Asia. In these regions, precipitation and TMR increase or decrease together. We find a contrast between the South and North of the planet: during El Niño, TMR increases in the Southern Hemisphere while decreasing in the Northern Hemisphere and the tropics. Overall, our results indicate that TMR weakening or strengthening are previously overlooked mechanisms behind precipitation changes caused by El Niño globally. Key Points: El Niño exerts significant effects on terrestrial moisture recycling worldwideEl Niño's impacts on terrestrial moisture recycling are most significant in seven regions worldwidePrecipitation and terrestrial moisture recycling increase or decrease together due to El Niño [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, a challenge in Climate Science is the seasonal forecast and knowledge of the model's performance in different regions. The challenge in South America reflects its huge territory; some models present a good performance, and others do not. Nevertheless, reliable seasonal climate forecasts can benefit numerous decision-making processes related to agriculture, energy generation, and extreme events mitigation. Thus, given the few works assessing the ECMWF-SEAS5 performance in South America, this study investigated the quality of its seasonal temperature and precipitation predictions over the continent. For this purpose, predictions from all members of the hindcasts (1993–2016) and forecasts (2017–2021) ensemble were used, considering the four yearly seasons. The analyses included seasonal mean fields, bias correction, anomaly correlations, statistical indicators, and seasonality index. The best system's performance occurred in regions strongly influenced by teleconnection effects, such as northern South America and northeastern Brazil, in which ECMWF-SEAS5 even reproduced the extreme precipitation anomalies that happened in recent decades. Moreover, the system indicated a moderate capability of seasonal predictions in medium and low predictability regions. In summary, the results show that ECMWF-SEAS5 climate forecasts are potentially helpful and should be considered to plan various strategic activities better. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contribution of extreme convective storms to rainfall in South America is investigated using 15 years of high-resolution data from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Precipitation Radar (PR). Precipitation from three specific types of storms with extreme horizontal and vertical dimensions have been calculated and compared to the climatological rain. The tropical and subtropical regions of South America differ markedly in the influence of storms with extreme dimensions. The tropical regions, especially the Amazon basin, have aspects similar to oceanic convection. Convection in the subtropical regions, centered on La Plata basin, exhibits patterns consistent with storm life cycles initiating in the foothills of the Andes and growing into larger mesoscale convective systems that propagate to the east. In La Plata basin, convective storms with a large horizontal dimension contribute ~44% of the rain and the accumulated influence of all three types of storms with extreme characteristics produce ~95% of the total precipitation in the austral summer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The South American monsoon system (SAMS) is the most important climatic feature in South America and is characterized by pronounced seasonality in precipitation during the austral summer. This study compares several statistical properties of daily gridded precipitation from different data (1998-2008): 1) Physical Sciences Division (PSD), Earth System Research Laboratory [1.0° and 2.5° latitude (lat)/longitude (lon)]; 2) Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP; 1° lat/lon); 3) Climate Prediction Center (CPC) unified gauge (CPC-uni) (0.5° lat/lon); 4) NCEP Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (CFSR) (0.5° lat/lon); 5) NASA Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA) reanalysis (0.5° lat/0.3° lon); and 6) Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) 3B42 V6 data (0.25° lat/lon). The same statistical analyses are applied to data in 1) a common 2.5° lat/lon grid and 2) in the original resolutions of the datasets. All datasets consistently represent the large-scale patterns of the SAMS. The onset, demise, and duration of SAMS are consistent among PSD, GPCP, CPC-uni, and TRMM datasets, whereas CFSR and MERRA seem to have problems in capturing the correct timing of SAMS. Spectral analyses show that intraseasonal variance is somewhat similar in the six datasets. Moreover, differences in spatial patterns of mean precipitation are small among PSD, GPCP, CPC-uni, and TRMM data, while some discrepancies are found in CFSR and MERRA relative to the other datasets. Fitting of gamma frequency distributions to daily precipitation shows differences in the parameters that characterize the shape, scale, and tails of the frequency distributions. This suggests that significant uncertainties exist in the characterization of extreme precipitation, an issue that is highly important in the context of climate variability and change in South America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The majority of precipitation in central Chile falls during austral winter with the passage of surface and upper-level low pressure systems and their associated surface fronts. Earlier studies have found the presence of a terrain-parallel, low-level barrier jet during cold front passage and low-level wind convergence in the region of heaviest precipitation. This study advances these findings by developing multiyear climatologies for a rainfall event in central Chile using a broad cross section of observational datasets: the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS), the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) Global Surface Summary of the Day (GSOD), the Integrated Global Radiosonde Archive (IGRA), the Quick Scatterometer (QuikSCAT), and the NCEP-NCAR reanalysis. For this study, a precipitation event was defined as daily rainfall exceeding a certain threshold at a Santiago observing station (Pudahuel). Climatologies were developed for a five-day period surrounding the precipitation event: the three days leading up to the day of precipitation at Pudahuel, the day of the precipitation itself, and the day after. Precipitation was found to move northeastward over the southeast Pacific toward central Chile and increase in intensity upon reaching reached the coast between 33° and 40°S. At middle levels, a pronounced 500-hPa trough moved eastward and amplified during the same period, and at the surface, an area of low pressure deepened and followed the same path to the east. In the boundary layer and lower troposphere, winds at 925 and 850 hPa became exclusively north-northwesterly, suggesting the existence of a low-level jet, and surface winds backed with time and increased in speed ahead of a well-defined cold front wind shift. As these winds became more northwesterly ahead of the upper-level trough and surface low, precipitable water values increased, and a tongue of high precipitable water air intersected the coast at the same location as the region of heaviest precipitation. These climatologies, based on hundreds of cases, together provide strong confirmation that forcing associated with an eastward-progressing upper-level trough, a terrain-parallel low-level wind maximum, and an advancing surface cold front together constitute the complex, complementary mechanisms for precipitation in central Chile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, the authors document the extent to which the precipitation statistics of the new CFS reanalysis (CFSR) represent an improvement over the earlier reanalyses: the NCEP--NCAR reanalysis (R1) and the NCEP--DOE Second Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project (AMIP-II) reanalysis (R2). An intercomparison between the CFSR, R1, R2, and observations over South America was made for the period 1979--2006. The CFSR shows notable improvements in the large-scale precipitation patterns compared with the previous reanalyses (R1 and R2). In spite of these improvements, the CFSR has substantial biases in intensity and frequency of occurrence of rainfall events. Over west-central Brazil, the core region of the South American monsoon system (SAMS), the CFSR displays a dry bias during the onset phase of the SAMS wet season and a wet bias during the peak and decay phases of the SAMS wet season. The CFSR also displays a dry bias along the South American coast near the mouth of the Amazon and along the east coast of northeastern Brazil. A wet bias exists in all seasons over southeast Brazil and over the Andes Mountains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work presents an updated climatology of blocking episodes for the Southern Hemisphere between 1960 and 2000, based on data from NCEP/NCAR reanalysis. Five contiguous areas of blocking activity are considered; Southeastern Pacific, Southwestern Pacific, Atlantic, Indian and Oceania. The impact of the three most important areas of onset blocking episodes (Southeastern Pacific, Atlantic and Oceania) upon the climate of the adjacent continental areas (South America and Australia) was evaluated. Composites of the meteorological variables (temperature and precipitation) were obtained for periods of diagnosed blockings. The impact of the blocking episodes over the climate of South America and Australia is highlighted whenever anomaly fields of temperature and precipitation are significant at the 5% and 10% levels, respectively. Impacts of Southeastern Pacific and Atlantic blockings are observed on the temperature field over several regions of South America. Significantly higher (lower) temperatures than climatology occur in southern Brazil, northern Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, and lower (higher) than climatology in the extreme south of South America for the Southeastern Pacific (Atlantic) blocking episodes. Precipitation over South America is also affected by the Southeastern Pacific and Atlantic blockings in different ways. The Southeastern Pacific blocking has higher impact on precipitation in summer (dry conditions in northeast Brazil) and spring (wet conditions in central and southern Brazil), while the Atlantic blocking affects precipitation in autumn and winter (wet conditions in parts of central and southern Brazil). The blocking cases over Oceania affect southeastern Australia with normal to higher than climatological precipitation and with negative temperature anomalies in that region. Finally we provide a detailed analysis of a South Atlantic blocking episode, which occurred between the 4th and the 8th of June 1997. This event shows clearly the split of the jet stream into two branches (subtropical and polar) surrounding the anticyclonic sector, and satellite imagery revealed the presence of transient systems in the periphery of the blocking anticyclone responsible for high values of precipitation in the southeastern sector of South America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]