Atmospheric drivers of winter above‐freezing temperatures and associated rainfall in western Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Winter thaw episodes, especially when accompanied by rain, can significantly deplete the winter snowpack, which is a critical water storage component in the mountainous headwater regions of the major river basins of western Canada. Here we identify the characteristic synoptic‐scale mid‐tropospheric atmospheric circulation regimes that tend to foster such extreme hydrologic events using self‐organizing map analysis of meteorological reanalysis data from 1949 to 2012. Daily winter 500 hPa geopotential height fields over the Pacific Ocean and western Canada are classified into 12 dominant synoptic types, for which conditional probabilities of above‐freezing temperatures and rainfall are then calculated and mapped using daily high‐resolution gridded data. Results show that above‐freezing surface air temperatures and rain events in winter are commonly associated with the occurrence of a ridge of high pressure over western Canada, which induces southwesterly advection of relatively warm, moist maritime air masses into the continental interior, and that the intensity and spatial footprint of the surface climate response is related to the strength and position of the ridge. Conversely, the development of a ridge of high pressure over the Pacific Ocean and adjacent trough of low pressure over western Canada, which favours northwesterly to westerly mid‐tropospheric flow over the continental interior in winter, tends to suppress the occurrence of above‐freezing temperatures and rain. The synoptic type most strongly associated with winter thaw and rain events underwent a statistically significant step‐change increase in mean frequency in 1977, accompanied by a corresponding step‐change decrease in the frequency of the dominant synoptic type depicting westerly (zonal) circulation, coinciding with a well‐documented shift to a positive phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".