Inverse relationship between present-day tropical precipitation and its sensitivity to greenhouse warming

Yoo-Geun Ham, Jong-Seong Kug (), Jun-Young Choi, Fei-Fei Jin and Masahiro Watanabe
Additional contact information
Yoo-Geun Ham: Chonnam National University
Jong-Seong Kug: Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH)
Jun-Young Choi: Chonnam National University
Fei-Fei Jin: University of Hawaii at Manoa
Masahiro Watanabe: University of Tokyo

Nature Climate Change, 2018, vol. 8, issue 1, 64-69

Abstract: Abstract Future changes in rainfall have serious impacts on human adaptation to climate change, but quantification of these changes is subject to large uncertainties in climate model projections. To narrow these uncertainties, significant efforts have been made to understand the intermodel differences in future rainfall changes. Here, we show a strong inverse relationship between present-day precipitation and its future change to possibly calibrate future precipitation change by removing the present-day bias in climate models. The results of the models with less tropical (40° S–40° N) present-day precipitation are closely linked to the dryness over the equatorial central-eastern Pacific, and project weaker regional precipitation increase due to the anthropogenic greenhouse forcing 1–6 with stronger zonal Walker circulation. This induces Indo-western Pacific warming through Bjerknes feedback, which reduces relative humidity by the enhanced atmospheric boundary-layer mixing in the future projection. This increases the air–sea humidity difference to enhance tropical evaporation and the resultant precipitation. Our estimation of the sensitivity of the tropical precipitation per 1 K warming, after removing a common bias in the present-day simulation, is about 50% greater than the original future multi-model projection.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-017-0033-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcli:v:8:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1038_s41558-017-0033-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nclimate/

DOI: 10.1038/s41558-017-0033-5

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Climate Change is currently edited by Bronwyn Wake

More articles in Nature Climate Change from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().