New publication about SACZ: "Oceanic SACZ produces an abnormally wet 2021/2022 rainy season in South America"

The newest publication led by Dr. Luciano Pezzi published this week presents new approaches related with the South Atlanctic Convergence Zone (SACZ), which can be responsible for more than 90% of the precipitation in some regions of Southeast Brazil and in some regions of the Southwestern Atlantic Ocean (SWA), during South America’s 2021/2022 summer extreme rainy season.

The phenomenum was very strong in both number of cases and intensity during the extremelly atypcal summer of 2021/2022 and is descrided as typically oceanic, fed by atmospheric rivers and possibly intensified by climate change. The episodes of oceanic SACZ described in the paper were studied using a regional ocean-atmosphere coupled model, satellite data and observations derived from our meteoceanographic buoy Cryosphere-1.

It is a extremely interesting subject as well as the modulation that SACZ causes on the surface of the ocean. Additionally, the stability of the MABL was discussed, and in this case based on unpublished observations made with the our Cryosphere-1 buoy.

(a) December, January, and February (DJF) climatology for the period from 2000 to 2021 of Outgoing Longwave Radiation (OLR) shaded (W m−2) and percentage of precipitation (PREC) blue hatched (contours, %) emphasizing areas containing more than 50% of the annual total. (b) Time-series of box-averaged OLR, PREC anomalies over the continent (CNT), the ocean (OCN), and the whole SACZ area (CNT + OCN), and the total number of SACZ events (according to Rosa et al.8) during each DJF season. (c) Cloud top brightness temperature (°C) composite for the seven oceanic SACZ events in DJF 2021/2022. (d) Topography (shaded in m). The CNT and OCN areas are indicated in (a) as polygons in red lines. Symbols in (d) display heavy rainfall (purple circles) and natural disasters (blue squares) resulting from inundations, flash floods, and landslides. Source: PEZZI et al, 2023.

The article is available at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-28803-w