Clemens Spensberger

My work covers many aspects of mid- and high latitude atmospheric dynamics, in particular fronts, jets and orography and air-ice-sea interaction. Some key results from my work are summarized here.

Jets, blocking and storm track variability

• The Southern Annular Mode (SAM) does not represent southern mid-latitude variability, but rather variability over Antartica and along its coast line (Spensberger et al. 2020, doi: 10.1175/JCLI-D-19-0224.1).
• Jet variability does not necessarily follow geopotential variability (Spensberger and Spengler 2020, doi: 10.1175/JCLI-D-19-0715.1).
• The stronger a jet, the less does it vary in position around its climatological mean, and the more does it favour anticyclonic wave breaking (Woollings et al. 2018, doi: 10.1175/JCLI-D-17-0286.1).
• The same blocking high pressure can lead to concurrent heat waves in different regions through different mechanisms (Spensberger et al. 2020, doi: 10.1002/qj.3822)

Air-ice-sea interaction

• Increasing atmospheric resolution and a sharper sea-ice edge invigorates the atmospheric water cycle in a cold-air outbreak (Spensberger and Spengler 2021, doi: 10.1029/2020JD033610).
• The temperature contrast along the SST fronts affects the atmosphere primarily in the absence of cyclones and fronts (Tsopouridis et al. 2021, discussion paper doi: 10.5194/wcd-2020-50; Reeder et al. 2021, doi: 10.1175/JAS-D-20-0118.1).
• Year-to-year variability in the heat loss to the atmosphere over the Arctic Ocean and Nordic Seas is driven by atmospheric variability, and associated with variations in the occurrence of cyclones and cold-air-outreaks (Smedsrud et al. 2021, submitted to Reviews of Geophysics, preprint doi: 10.1002/essoar.10506171.1).

Frontal dynamics

• It is useful to distinguish not only between cold and warm fronts, but also between fronts that are more/less (a) kinematically intense, (b) affected by moist processes and (c) associated with surface fluxes (Spensberger and Sprenger 2018, doi: 10.1002/qj.3199).

Impact of orography on synoptic systems

• The Scandinavian mountains had only a minor influence on the evolution of the New Year's Day Storm 1992, although the mountain range separated the cyclone core from the cyclone's warm sector (Spensberger and Schemm 2020, doi: 10.5194/wcd-1-175-2020).
• We lack a satisfactory conceptual model to describe and explain cyclogenesis in the lee of the Rocky Mountains (Spensberger et al. 2017, doi: 10.1175/MWR-D-16-0195.1).

Idealised modelling

• I am the main developer of the quasi-geostrophic and primitive-equation model Bedymo (manuscript submitted to GMD).