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Precipitation variability increases in a warmer climate
Understanding changes in precipitation variability is essential for a complete explanation of the hydrologic cycle’s response to warming and its impacts. While changes in mean and extreme precipitation have been studied intensively, precipitation variability has received less attention, despite its...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group UK
2017
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5740108/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29269737 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-17966-y |
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author | Pendergrass, Angeline G. Knutti, Reto Lehner, Flavio Deser, Clara Sanderson, Benjamin M. |
author_facet | Pendergrass, Angeline G. Knutti, Reto Lehner, Flavio Deser, Clara Sanderson, Benjamin M. |
author_sort | Pendergrass, Angeline G. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Understanding changes in precipitation variability is essential for a complete explanation of the hydrologic cycle’s response to warming and its impacts. While changes in mean and extreme precipitation have been studied intensively, precipitation variability has received less attention, despite its theoretical and practical importance. Here, we show that precipitation variability in most climate models increases over a majority of global land area in response to warming (66% of land has a robust increase in variability of seasonal-mean precipitation). Comparing recent decades to RCP8.5 projections for the end of the 21(st) century, we find that in the global, multi-model mean, precipitation variability increases 3–4% K(−1) globally, 4–5% K(−1) over land and 2–4% K(−1) over ocean, and is remarkably robust on a range of timescales from daily to decadal. Precipitation variability increases by at least as much as mean precipitation and less than moisture and extreme precipitation for most models, regions, and timescales. We interpret this as being related to an increase in moisture which is partially mitigated by weakening circulation. We show that changes in observed daily variability in station data are consistent with increased variability. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5740108 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2017 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group UK |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-57401082018-01-03 Precipitation variability increases in a warmer climate Pendergrass, Angeline G. Knutti, Reto Lehner, Flavio Deser, Clara Sanderson, Benjamin M. Sci Rep Article Understanding changes in precipitation variability is essential for a complete explanation of the hydrologic cycle’s response to warming and its impacts. While changes in mean and extreme precipitation have been studied intensively, precipitation variability has received less attention, despite its theoretical and practical importance. Here, we show that precipitation variability in most climate models increases over a majority of global land area in response to warming (66% of land has a robust increase in variability of seasonal-mean precipitation). Comparing recent decades to RCP8.5 projections for the end of the 21(st) century, we find that in the global, multi-model mean, precipitation variability increases 3–4% K(−1) globally, 4–5% K(−1) over land and 2–4% K(−1) over ocean, and is remarkably robust on a range of timescales from daily to decadal. Precipitation variability increases by at least as much as mean precipitation and less than moisture and extreme precipitation for most models, regions, and timescales. We interpret this as being related to an increase in moisture which is partially mitigated by weakening circulation. We show that changes in observed daily variability in station data are consistent with increased variability. Nature Publishing Group UK 2017-12-21 /pmc/articles/PMC5740108/ /pubmed/29269737 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-17966-y Text en © The Author(s) 2017 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
spellingShingle | Article Pendergrass, Angeline G. Knutti, Reto Lehner, Flavio Deser, Clara Sanderson, Benjamin M. Precipitation variability increases in a warmer climate |
title | Precipitation variability increases in a warmer climate |
title_full | Precipitation variability increases in a warmer climate |
title_fullStr | Precipitation variability increases in a warmer climate |
title_full_unstemmed | Precipitation variability increases in a warmer climate |
title_short | Precipitation variability increases in a warmer climate |
title_sort | precipitation variability increases in a warmer climate |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5740108/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29269737 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-17966-y |
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