TY  - JOUR
A1  - Hoff, Amelie Simone
A1  - Scholder-Aemisegger, Franziska
A1  - Sprenger, Michael
A1  - Ahrens, Bodo
T1  - Moisture sources of heavy precipitation in Central Europe in synoptic situations with Vb-cyclones
T2  - Climate dynamics
N2  - During the past century, several extreme summer floods in Central Europe were associated with so-called Vb-cyclones propagating from the Mediterranean Sea north-eastward to Central Europe. The processes intensifying the precipitation in synoptic situations with Vb-cyclones in the Danube, Elbe, and Odra catchments are only partially understood. Our study aims to investigate these processes with Lagrangian moisture-source diagnostics for 16 selected Vb-events. Moreover, we analyse the characteristics of typical moisture source regions during 1107 Vb-events from 1901 to 2010 based on ERA-20C reanalysis dynamically downscaled with COSMO-CLM+NEMO. We observe moisture contributions by various source regions highlighting the complex dynamical interplay of different air masses leading to moisture convergence in synoptic situations with Vb-cyclones. Overall, up to 80% of the precipitation originates from the European continent, indicating the importance of continental moisture recycling, especially within the respective river catchment. Other major moisture uptake regions are the North Sea, the Baltic Sea, the North Atlantic, and for a few events the Black Sea. Remarkably, anomalies in these oceanic source regions show no connection to precipitation amounts in synoptic situations with Vb-cyclones. In contrast, the Vb-cyclones with the highest precipitation are associated with anomalously high evaporation in the Mediterranean Sea, even though the Mediterranean Sea is only a minor moisture source region on average. Interestingly, the evaporation anomalies are not connected with sea-surface temperature but with wind-speed anomalies (Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient R≈0.7, significant with p<0.01) indicating mainly dynamically driven evaporation. The particular role of the Mediterranean Sea hints towards possible importance of Mediterranean moisture for the early-stage intensification of Vb-cyclones and the pre-moistening of the continental uptake regions upstream of the target catchments.
KW  - Vb-cyclones
KW  - Heavy precipitation events
KW  - Danube
KW  - Elbe
KW  - Odra
KW  - Marginal seas
KW  - Twentieth century reanalysis
Y1  - 2022
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/69587
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-695877
SN  - 1432-0894
N1  - The financial support of the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) in terms of the research group FOR 2416 Space-Time Dynamics of Extreme Floods (SPATE) is gratefully acknowledged.
N1  - Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.
N1  - This work used resources of the Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum (DKRZ) granted by its Scientific Steering Committee (WLA) under project ID bb1064.
VL  - 59
IS  - 11-12
SP  - 3227
EP  - 3245
PB  - Springer
CY  - Berlin ; Heidelberg
ER  -