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El Niño increases the risk of lower Mississippi River flooding
Mississippi River floods rank among the costliest climate-related disasters in the world. Improving flood predictability, preparedness, and response at seasonal to decadal time-scales requires an understanding of the climatic controls that govern flood occurrence. Linking flood occurrence to persist...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group UK
2017
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5431953/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28496184 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-01919-6 |
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author | Munoz, Samuel E. Dee, Sylvia G. |
author_facet | Munoz, Samuel E. Dee, Sylvia G. |
author_sort | Munoz, Samuel E. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Mississippi River floods rank among the costliest climate-related disasters in the world. Improving flood predictability, preparedness, and response at seasonal to decadal time-scales requires an understanding of the climatic controls that govern flood occurrence. Linking flood occurrence to persistent modes of climate variability like the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) has proven challenging, due in part to the limited number of high-magnitude floods available for study in the instrumental record. To augment the relatively short instrumental record, we use output from the Community Earth System Model (CESM) Last Millennium Ensemble (LME) to investigate the dynamical controls on discharge extremes of the lower Mississippi River. We show that through its regional influence on surface water storage, the warm phase of ENSO preconditions the lower Mississippi River to be vulnerable to flooding. In the 6–12 months preceding a flood, El Niño generates a positive precipitation anomaly over the lower Mississippi basin that gradually builds up soil moisture and reduces the basin’s infiltration capacity, thereby elevating the risk of a major flood during subsequent rainstorms. Our study demonstrates how natural climate variability mediates the formation of extreme floods on one of the world’s principal commercial waterways, adding significant predictive ability to near- and long-term forecasts of flood risk. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5431953 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2017 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group UK |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-54319532017-05-16 El Niño increases the risk of lower Mississippi River flooding Munoz, Samuel E. Dee, Sylvia G. Sci Rep Article Mississippi River floods rank among the costliest climate-related disasters in the world. Improving flood predictability, preparedness, and response at seasonal to decadal time-scales requires an understanding of the climatic controls that govern flood occurrence. Linking flood occurrence to persistent modes of climate variability like the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) has proven challenging, due in part to the limited number of high-magnitude floods available for study in the instrumental record. To augment the relatively short instrumental record, we use output from the Community Earth System Model (CESM) Last Millennium Ensemble (LME) to investigate the dynamical controls on discharge extremes of the lower Mississippi River. We show that through its regional influence on surface water storage, the warm phase of ENSO preconditions the lower Mississippi River to be vulnerable to flooding. In the 6–12 months preceding a flood, El Niño generates a positive precipitation anomaly over the lower Mississippi basin that gradually builds up soil moisture and reduces the basin’s infiltration capacity, thereby elevating the risk of a major flood during subsequent rainstorms. Our study demonstrates how natural climate variability mediates the formation of extreme floods on one of the world’s principal commercial waterways, adding significant predictive ability to near- and long-term forecasts of flood risk. Nature Publishing Group UK 2017-05-11 /pmc/articles/PMC5431953/ /pubmed/28496184 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-01919-6 Text en © The Author(s) 2017 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
spellingShingle | Article Munoz, Samuel E. Dee, Sylvia G. El Niño increases the risk of lower Mississippi River flooding |
title | El Niño increases the risk of lower Mississippi River flooding |
title_full | El Niño increases the risk of lower Mississippi River flooding |
title_fullStr | El Niño increases the risk of lower Mississippi River flooding |
title_full_unstemmed | El Niño increases the risk of lower Mississippi River flooding |
title_short | El Niño increases the risk of lower Mississippi River flooding |
title_sort | el niño increases the risk of lower mississippi river flooding |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5431953/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28496184 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-01919-6 |
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