EarlySpringOnset

Evaluating anomalously early spring onsets in the 21st century

Under construction... [Python 2.7]

Contact

Zachary Labe - Research Website - @ZLabe

Description

The onset of spring is important for the dynamics of the Earth system and a variety of ecological sectors. Understanding changes in the timing and frequency of anomalously early springs will be necessary for evaluating the climate system in response to natural and anthropogenic forcings. We focus on the dynamics and changes in spring onset through historical and future periods using a variety of observational and modeling experiments. Our most recent project uses the CESM Large Ensemble (LENS) project and Extend Spring Indices Model (SI-x) to understand the risk of March 2012-like (earliest spring in observational record) springs through the end of the 21st century. Our findings suggest that the forced warming in response to climate change will make the frequency of March 2012-like springs the new normal by mid century

• Literature/: Associated documents and research notes for current project
• Scripts/: Main Python scripts/functions used in data analysis and plotting
• requirements.txt: List of environments and modules associated with the most recent version of this project. A Python Anaconda2 Distribution was used for our analysis. Tools including CDO and NCO were also used for initial data manipulation.

Data

• Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project (BEST) : [DATA]
  • Rohde, R. and Coauthors (2013) Berkeley earth temperature averaging process. Geoinform Geostat Overv. doi:10.4172/2327-4581.1000103 [Publication]
• CESM Large Ensemble Project (LENS) : [DATA]
  • Kay, J. E and Coauthors, 2015: The Community Earth System Model (CESM) large ensemble project: A community resource for studying climate change in the presence of internal climate variability. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 96, 1333–1349, doi:10.1175/BAMS-D-13-00255.1 [Publication]
• NCEP-DOE Reanalysis 2 (R2): [DATA]
  • M. Kanamitsu, and co-authors., 2002: NCEP-DOE AMIP-II Reanalysis (R-2). Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 1631-1643 [Publication]
• Spring Indices (SI) : [DATA]
  • Ault, T.R., Mark D. Schwartz, Raul Zurita-Milla, Jake F. Weltzin, and Julio L. Betancourt, 2015: Trends and Natural Variability of Spring Onset in the Coterminous United States as Evaluated by a New Gridded Dataset of Spring Indices. J. Climate, 28, 8363–8378, doi:10.1175/JCLI-D-14-00736.1 [Publication]

Model

• Extended Spring Indices Model (SI-x) : [CODE]
  • Ault, T. R., Zurita-Milla, R., & Schwartz, M. D., 2015: A Matlab© toolbox for calculating spring indices from daily meteorological data. Computers & Geosciences, 83, 46-53, doi.org/10.1016/j.cageo.2015.06.015 [Publication]

Refereed/Peer-Reviewed Publications:

• Labe, Z.M., T.R. Ault, and R. Zurita-Milla (2016), Identifying Anomalously Early Spring Onsets in the CESM Large Ensemble Project, R. Clim Dyn, DOI:10.1007/s00382-016-3313-2. [HTML] [PDF] [BibTeX]

Non-refereed/Other Publications:

• Labe, Z.M., April 2015: Anomalously Early Onset of Spring in the CESM Large Ensemble. Cornell University. Undergraduate Honors Thesis. [PDF]

Conferences

• Labe, Z.M. and T.R. Ault. Anomalously Early Onset of Spring in the CESM Large Ensemble Project, 95th American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting, Phoenix, AZ (Jan 2015). [Abstract] [Poster]