- 著者
- Hiroaki Kawase Akira Yamazaki Hajime Iida Kazuma Aoki Wataru Shimada Hidetaka Sasaki Akihiko Murata Masaya Nosaka
- 出版者
- Meteorological Society of Japan
- 雑誌
- SOLA (ISSN:13496476)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.14, pp.39-45, 2018 (Released:2018-03-29)
- 参考文献数
- 22
- 被引用文献数
- 8
Extremely small snow cover in the winter of 2015/16 and interannual variations of snow cover over the Japanese Northern Alps are simulated by a regional climate model with 2 km grid spacing based on the Japanese 55-year Reanalysis (JRA-55). Our simulation well reproduces the daily variation of snow depth along the Tateyama-Kurobe Alpine Route, located at the Japanese Northern Alps, as compared to snow depths observed by time-lapse cameras in 2014/15. Our simulations indicate that the maximum snow depth in 2015/16 was the lowest of 16 years at high elevations, especially in the spring. In March 2016, weak cold air outbreaks and inactive storm-tracks cause little precipitation around central Japan, resulting in greatly reduced annual accumulated snowfall than usual at high elevations. Warmer April conditions also contribute to accelerated snow melting, resulting in the disappearance of snow at high elevations one-month earlier than usual. Analysis of large-scale circulations related to past large El Niño years shows a warmer April is a typical response in El Niño events, while weak cold air outbreaks and inactive storm-tracks are contributed by the extratropical internal variation rather than lingering El Niño effects in tropics.
- 著者
- Teppei J. Yasunari K.-M. Lau Sarith P. P. Mahanama Peter R. Colarco Arlindo M. da Silva Teruo Aoki Kazuma Aoki Naoto Murao Sadamu Yamagata Yuji Kodama
- 出版者
- (公社)日本気象学会
- 雑誌
- SOLA (ISSN:13496476)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.10, pp.50-56, 2014 (Released:2014-04-23)
- 参考文献数
- 44
- 被引用文献数
- 5 13
The snow darkening module evaluating dust, black carbon (BC), and organic carbon (OC) depositions on the mass of snow impurities and albedo has been developed for the NASA Goddard Earth Observing System, Version 5 (GEOS-5) Earth System Model, as the GOddard SnoW Impurity Module (GOSWIM). GOSWIM consists of the updated snow albedo scheme from a previous study (Yasunari et al. 2011) and a newly developed mass concentration calculation scheme, directly using aerosol depositions from the chemical transport model (GOCART) in GEOS-5. Compared to observations at Sapporo, the off-line simulations, forced by observation-based meteorology and aerosol depositions from GOES-5, reasonably simulated the seasonal migration of snow depth, albedos, and impurities of dust, BC, and OC in the snow surface. However, the simulated dust and BC mass concentrations in snow were especially underestimated except for the BC in the early winter, compared to the observations. Increasing the deposition rates of dust and BC could explain the observations. Removing BC deposition could possibly lead to an extension of snow cover duration in Sapporo of four days. Comparing the off-line GOSWIM and the GEOS-5 global simulations, we found that determining better local precipitation and deposition rates of the aerosols are key factors in generating better GOSWIM snow darkening simulation in NASA GEOS-5.