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An energetic perspective on the regional response of precipitation to climate change

Nature Climate Change volume 1, pages 266–271 (2011)Cite this article

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Abstract

Understanding and predicting the response of the hydrological cycle to climate change is a major challenge with important societal implications. Much progress has been made in understanding the response of global average precipitation by considering the energy balances of the atmosphere and the surface1,2,3,4,5,6. This energetic perspective reveals that changes in temperature, greenhouse gases, aerosols, solar forcing and cloud feedbacks can all affect the global average rate of precipitation5,7,8,9,10,11. Local precipitation changes have conventionally been analysed using the water vapour budget, but here we show that the energetic approach can be extended to local changes in precipitation by including changes in horizontal energy transport. In simulations of twenty-first century climate change, this energy transport accounts for much of the spatial variability in precipitation change. We show that changes in radiative and surface sensible heat fluxes are a guide to the local precipitation response over land and at large scales, but not at small scales over the ocean, where cloud and water vapour radiative feedbacks dampen the response. The energetic approach described here helps bridge the gap between our understanding of global and regional precipitation changes. It could be applied to better understand the response of regional precipitation to different radiative forcings, including geo-engineering schemes, as well as to understand the differences between the fast and slow responses of regional precipitation to such forcings.

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Figure 1: Spatial pattern of precipitation changes and contributions from the various terms in the energy budget.
Figure 2: Inter-model correlation coefficient between the changes in precipitation and diabatic cooling.
Figure 3: Annual and multimodel-mean change in precipitation and an approximate expression from energy balance.
Figure 4: Annual and multimodel-mean thermodynamic and dynamic contributions to the change in the vertical-advective component of the dry static energy flux divergence.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the modelling groups, the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI) and the WCRP’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling (WGCM) for their roles in making available the WCRP CMIP3 multi-model dataset. Support of this dataset is provided by the Office of Science, US Department of Energy. C.J.M. would like to thank I. Held and G. Vecchi for useful discussions about this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Princeton University/GFDL, Princeton, New Jersey 08540, USA

    C. J. Muller

  2. Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA

    P. A. O’Gorman

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  1. C. J. Muller
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  2. P. A. O’Gorman
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Contributions

C.J.M. and P.A.O. designed the study. C.J.M. performed the analysis and wrote the paper. Both authors discussed the results and edited the manuscript.

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Correspondence to C. J. Muller.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Muller, C., O’Gorman, P. An energetic perspective on the regional response of precipitation to climate change. Nature Clim Change 1, 266–271 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1169

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