Uncertainty reduction for precipitation prediction in North America

Dan Lou, Wouter R Berghuijs, Waheed Ullah, Boyuan Zhu, Dawei Shi, Yong Hu, Chao Li, Safi Ullah, Hao Zhou, Yuanfang Chai and Danyang Yu

PLOS ONE, 2024, vol. 19, issue 5, 1-18

Abstract: Large differences in projected future annual precipitation increases in North America exists across 27 CMIP6 models under four emission scenarios. These differences partly arise from weak representations of land-atmosphere interactions. Here we demonstrate an emergent constraint relationship between annual growth rates of future precipitation and growth rates of historical temperature. The original CMIP6 projections show 0.49% (SSP126), 0.98% (SSP245), 1.45% (SSP370) and 1.92% (SSP585) increases in precipitation per decade. Combining observed warming trends, the constrained results show that the best estimates of future precipitation increases are more likely to reach 0.40–0.48%, 0.83–0.93%, 1.29–1.45% and 1.70–1.87% respectively, implying an overestimated future precipitation increases across North America. The constrained results also are narrow the corresponding uncertainties (standard deviations) by 13.8–31.1%. The overestimated precipitation growth rates also reveal an overvalued annual growth rates in temperature (6.0–13.2% or 0.12–0.37°C) and in total evaporation (4.8–14.5%) by the original models’ predictions. These findings highlight the important role of temperature for accurate climate predictions, which is important as temperature from current climate models’ simulations often still have systematic errors.

Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0301759 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.13 ... 01759&type=printable (application/pdf)

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:plo:pone00:0301759

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0301759

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().