Atmospheric rivers (ARs) are filamentary structures within the atmosphere that account for a substantial portion of poleward moisture transport and play an important role in Earth’s hydroclimate. However, there is no one quantitative definition for what constitutes an atmospheric river, leading to uncertainty in quantifying how these systems respond to global change. This study seeks to better understand how different AR detection tools (ARDTs) respond to changes in climate states utilizing single-forcing climate model experiments under the aegis of the Atmospheric River Tracking Method Intercomparison Project (ARTMIP). We compare a simulation with an early Holocene orbital configuration and another with CO2 levels of the Last Glacial Maximum to a pre-industrial control simulation to test how the ARDTs respond to changes in seasonality and mean climate state, respectively. We find good agreement among the algorithms in the AR response to the changing orbital configuration, with a poleward shift in AR frequency that tracks seasonal poleward shifts in atmospheric water vapor and zonal winds. In the low CO2 simulation, the algorithms generally agree on the sign of AR changes but there is substantial spread in their magnitude, indicating that mean-state changes lead to larger uncertainty. This disagreement likely arises primarily from differences between algorithms in their thresholds for water vapor and its transport used for identifying ARs. These findings warrant caution in ARDT selection for paleoclimate and climate change studies in which there is a change to the mean climate state, as ARDT selection contributes substantial uncertainty in such cases.

Atmospheric rivers (ARs) are extreme hydrological events that have strong impacts on the Antarctic surface mass balance (SMB), through both snow accumulation and surface melt due to heating and rain. To estimate their impacts on future SMB, we study Antarctic ARs in an ensemble of 21st century simulations. While the number of detected ARs increases continuously when using a constant detection threshold based on historical moisture fluxes, it remains stable with an adaptive threshold evolving with the rising background moisture. However, ARs penetrate further into Antarctica following a wave number 3 pattern. In addition, the intensity of Antarctic ARs, measured by moisture fluxes, is simulated to increase following the Clausius-Clapeyron relation. The opposing SMB impacts become larger, with both increasing snowfall, and coastal surface melt and rainfall. Yet, their overall influence on the SMB is dominated by increased snow accumulation.

During atmospheric river (AR) landfalls on the Antarctic ice sheet, the high waviness of the circumpolar polar jet stream allows for sub-tropical air masses to be advected towards the Antarctic coastline. These rare but high-impact AR events are highly consequential for the Antarctic mass balance; yet little is known about the various atmospheric dynamical components determining their life cycle. By using an AR detection algorithm to retrieve AR landfalls at Dumont d’Urville and non-AR analogues based on 700 hPa geopotential height, we examined what makes AR landfalls unique and studied the complete life cycle of ARs to affect Dumont d’Urville. ARs form in the mid-latitudes/sub-tropics in areas of high surface evaporation, likely in response to tropical deep convection anomalies. These convection anomalies likely lead to Rossby wave trains that help amplify the upper-tropospheric flow pattern. As the AR approaches Antarctica, condensation of isentropically lifted moisture causes latent heat release that – in conjunction with poleward warm air advection – induces geopotential height rises and anticyclonic upper-level potential vorticity tendencies downstream. As evidenced by a blocking index, these tendencies lead to enhanced ridging/blocking that persist beyond the AR landfall time, sustaining warm air advection onto the ice sheet. Finally, we demonstrate a connection between tropopause polar vortices and mid-latitude cyclogenesis in an AR case study. Overall, the non-AR analogues reveal that the amplified jet pattern observed during AR landfalls is a result of enhanced poleward moisture transport and associated diabatic heating which is likely impossible to replicate without strong moisture transport.

Aerosols play a key role in polar climate, and are affected by long-range transport from the mid-latitudes, both in the Arctic and Antarctic. This work investigates poleward extreme transport events of aerosols, referred to as aerosol rivers (AeR), leveraging the concept of atmospheric rivers (AR) which signal extreme transport of moisture. Using reanalysis data, we build a detection catalog of polar AeRs for black carbon, dust, sea salt and organic carbon aerosols, for the period 1980–2022. First, we describe the detection algorithm, discuss its sensitivity, and evaluate its validity. Then, we present several extreme transport case studies, in the Arctic and in the Antarctic, illustrating the complementarity between ARs and AeRs. Despite similarities in transport pathways during co-occurring AR/AeR events, vertical profiles differ depending on the species, and large-scale transport patterns show that moisture and aerosols do not necessarily originate from the same areas. The complementarity between AR and AeR is also evidenced by their long-term characteristics in terms of spatial distribution, seasonality and trends. AeR detection, as a complement to AR, can have several important applications for better understanding polar climate and its connections to the mid-latitudes.

We investigate the spatial and temporal variability of extreme precipitation events (EPEs) in the Dronning Maud Land (DML) sector of Antarctica using high-resolution ECMWF ERA5 reanalysis data. This study examines the spatial occurrence of EPEs across DML, focusing particularly on six locations spanning the coastal and interior parts of the area. The largest snowfall amounts are usually found on eastward-facing slopes in the coastal zone. EPEs occur predominantly in north-easterly to easterly flows, leading to enhanced precipitation on the windward side of the orographic features with a steep gradient. Wind during EPEs was found to be more directionally consistent in the coastal area than in the interior. An east-west couplet of a mid-tropospheric ridge and low-pressure center is essential for steering warm moist maritime airmasses into the DML region before EPEs. Approximately 40% of EPEs result from atmospheric rivers (ARs), narrow bands of moist air originating at subtropical latitudes, which provide the greatest daily precipitation amounts. From 1979 to 2018, much of the DML experienced a statistically significant (p < 0.05) increase in the number of EPEs per year, along with increased precipitation from the EPEs. These trends were associated with significant changes in moisture availability and poleward meridional winds in the Atlantic sector of the Southern Ocean. The inter-annual variability in the number of EPEs is primarily dictated by regional atmospheric variability, while the influence of the Southern Oscillation Index and Southern Annular Mode is limited.