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

Nature Climate Change volume 8, pages 64–69 (2018)Cite this article

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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 forcing1,2,3,4,5,6 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.

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Fig. 1: Greater precipitation sensitivity in dry models in CMIP5 archives.
Fig. 2: Decomposition of precipitation sensitivity using the bulk formula.
Fig. 3: The spatial distribution of the difference in climatological change.
Fig. 4: Relationship between SST change and relative humidity change due to greenhouse warming.

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Acknowledgements

Y.-G.H. was supported by the Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (NRF-2016R1A6A1A03012647). J.-Y.C. was supported by the Korean Meteorological Administration Research and Development Program under grant KMIPA2015–6170. J.-S.K. is supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2017R1A2B3011511).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Oceanography, Chonnam National University, Gwangju, South Korea

    Yoo-Geun Ham & Jun-Young Choi

  2. Division of Earth Science and Engineering, Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), Pohang, South Korea

    Jong-Seong Kug

  3. Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA

    Fei-Fei Jin

  4. Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, University of Tokyo, Kashiwa, Chiba, Japan

    Masahiro Watanabe

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Contributions

Y.-G.H. and J.-S.K. designed the research, conducted analyses and wrote the majority of the manuscript. M.W. and F.-F.J. conducted the analysis and report-writing tasks. J.-Y.C. performed the model experiments. All of the authors discussed the study results and reviewed the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Jong-Seong Kug.

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Supplementary Table 1 and Supplementary Figures 1–15.

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Ham, YG., Kug, JS., Choi, JY. et al. Inverse relationship between present-day tropical precipitation and its sensitivity to greenhouse warming. Nature Clim Change 8, 64–69 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-017-0033-5

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