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Causes of change in Northern Hemisphere winter meridional winds and regional hydroclimate

Nature Climate Change volume 6, pages 65–70 (2016)Cite this article

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Abstract

A critical aspect of human-induced climate change is how it will affect precipitation around the world. Broadly speaking, warming increases atmospheric moisture holding capacity, intensifies moisture transports and makes sub-tropical dry regions drier and tropical and mid-to-high-latitude wet regions wetter1,2. Extra-tropical precipitation patterns vary strongly with longitude, however, owing to the control exerted by the storm tracks and quasi-stationary highs and lows or stationary waves. Regional precipitation change will, therefore, also depend on how these aspects of the circulation respond. Current climate models robustly predict a change in the Northern Hemisphere (NH) winter stationary wave field that brings wetting southerlies to the west coast of North America, and drying northerlies to interior southwest North America and the eastern Mediterranean3,4,5. Here we show that this change in the meridional wind field is caused by strengthened zonal mean westerlies in the sub-tropical upper troposphere, which alters the character of intermediate-scale stationary waves. Thus, a robust and easily understood model response to global warming is the prime cause of these regional wind changes. However, the majority of models probably overestimate the magnitude of this response because of biases in their climatological representation of the relevant waves, suggesting that winter season wetting of the North American west coast will be notably less than projected by the multi-model mean.

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Figure 1: The DJF v∗ response to climate change.
Figure 2: 300 hPa v∗ from stationary wave model simulations (see Methods).
Figure 3: Testing the influence of different aspects of the basic state change.
Figure 4: Demonstrating the lengthening of intermediate-scale stationary waves.
Figure 5: Understanding the model spread over North America.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to H. Liu and N. Henderson for maintaining the LDEO CMIP-5 archive that houses most of the data used in this study. This work was funded by NSF awards AGS-1317469 and AGS 1243204. TAS acknowledges funding from NSF CAREER award AGS-1538944 and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling, which is responsible for CMIP, and we thank the climate modelling groups listed in Supplementary Table 1 for producing and making available their model output. For CMIP the US Department of Energy’s Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison provides coordinating support and led development of software infrastructure in partnership with the Global Organization for Earth System Science Portals.

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  1. Isla R. Simpson

    Present address: Present address: Climate and Global Dynamics Division, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado 80307, USA.,

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, Palisades, New York 10964, USA

    Isla R. Simpson, Richard Seager, Mingfang Ting & Tiffany A. Shaw

  2. Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027, USA

    Tiffany A. Shaw

  3. Department of Geophysical Sciences, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA

    Tiffany A. Shaw

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Contributions

All authors conceived of the study. I.R.S. conducted the analysis and modelling and all authors contributed to the interpretation of results. M.T. provided the stationary wave model code and advice on its set-up and I.R.S. wrote the manuscript with input from all authors.

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Correspondence to Isla R. Simpson.

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Simpson, I., Seager, R., Ting, M. et al. Causes of change in Northern Hemisphere winter meridional winds and regional hydroclimate. Nature Clim Change 6, 65–70 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2783

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