Constraints on future changes in climate and the hydrologic cycle

Myles R. Allen () and William J. Ingram ()
Additional contact information
Myles R. Allen: University of Oxford
William J. Ingram: The Hadley Centre, Met Office

Nature, 2002, vol. 419, issue 6903, 224-232

Abstract: Abstract What can we say about changes in the hydrologic cycle on 50-year timescales when we cannot predict rainfall next week? Eventually, perhaps, a great deal: the overall climate response to increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases may prove much simpler and more predictable than the chaos of short-term weather. Quantifying the diversity of possible responses is essential for any objective, probability-based climate forecast, and this task will require a new generation of climate modelling experiments, systematically exploring the range of model behaviour that is consistent with observations. It will be substantially harder to quantify the range of possible changes in the hydrologic cycle than in global-mean temperature, both because the observations are less complete and because the physical constraints are weaker.

Date: 2002
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (72)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature01092 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:nature:v:419:y:2002:i:6903:d:10.1038_nature01092

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

DOI: 10.1038/nature01092

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

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