Abstract
Global mean precipitation is expected to increase with increasing temperatures, a process which is fairly well understood. In contrast, local precipitation changes, which are key for society and ecosystems, demonstrate a large spread in predictions by climate models, can be of both signs and have much larger magnitude than the global mean change. Previously, two top-down approaches to constrain precipitation changes were proposed, using either the atmospheric water or energy budget. Here, using an ensemble of 27 climate models, we study the relative importance of these two budgetary constraints and present analysis of the spatial scales at which they hold. We show that specific geographical locations are more constrained by either one of the budgets and that the combination of water and energy budgets provides a significantly stronger constraint on the spatial scale of precipitation changes under anthropogenic climate change (on average about 3000 km, above which changes in precipitation approach the global mean change). These results could also provide an objective way to define the scale of ‘regional’ climate change.
| Original language | American English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 34 |
| Journal | npj Climate and Atmospheric Science |
| Volume | 3 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 1 Dec 2020 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This research was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) project constRaining the EffeCts of Aerosols on Precipitation (RECAP) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme with grant agreement No 724602. PS also acknowledges support by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. We acknowledge the WCRP’s Working Group on Coupled Modeling, which is responsible for CMIP, and we thank the climate modeling groups (listed in Supplementary Table S1) for producing and making available their model output: https://cmip.llnl.gov/cmip5/data_portal.html.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, The Author(s).
