Numerical Water Tracers in the Atmospheric Component of the Energy Exascale Earth System Model: Implementation and Changes in Moisture Origin

Numerical water tracers are implemented in the Energy Exascale Earth System Model version 2. Simulations performed with the water-tag-enabled model for both pre-industrial and future greenhouse gas concentrations reveal a marked increase in the role of mid-latitude and southern subtropical regions as exporters of atmospheric moisture—to the extratropical upper troposphere and the tropical free troposphere. For the latter, the northward shift of the Intertropical Convergence Zone increases cross-hemispheric transport of subtropical water vapor to the Northern Hemisphere. In the polar regions, most of the lower tropospheric moistening instead arises from increases in local evaporation. These findings illustrate the utility of the water tags, underscore critical changes in global hydrologic cycle, and provide insight into atmospheric dynamics under future climate scenarios. For applications when a global grid is desired, we additionally propose a novel statistical reconstruction, based on copula modeling, of the joint distribution of origin of water vapor, which reduces the number of tracers from order (Formula presented.) to order (Formula presented.), substantially ameliorating the considerable computational cost of water tracers. This statistical reconstruction is particularly beneficial to the interpretation of the relationship between latitude and longitude of origin of moisture over the tropical oceans and in the lower troposphere over land.