How closely do changes in surface and column water vapor follow Clausius–Clapeyron scaling in climate change simulations?
By P. O’Gorman, C. Muller. 2010
603 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The factors governing the rate of change in the amount of atmospheric water vapor are analyzed in simulations of climate change. The global-mean amount of water vapor is estimated to increase at a differential rate of 7.3% K − 1 with respect to global-mean surface air temperature in the multi-model mean. Larger rates of change result if the fractional change is evaluated over a finite change in temperature (e.g., 8.2% K − 1 for a 3 K warming), and rates of change of zonal-mean column water vapor range from 6 to 12% K − 1 depending on latitude. Clausius–Clapeyron scaling is directly evaluated using an invariant distribution of monthly-mean relative humidity, giving a rate of 7.4% K − 1 for global-mean water vapor. There are deviations from Clausius–Clapeyron scaling of zonal-mean column water vapor in the tropics and mid-latitudes, but they largely cancel in the global mean. A purely thermodynamic scaling based on a saturated troposphere gives a higher global rate of 7.9% K − 1. Surface specific humidity increases at a rate of 5.7% K − 1, considerably lower than the rate for global-mean water vapor. Surface specific humidity closely follows Clausius–Clapeyron scaling over ocean. But there are widespread decreases in surface relative humidity over land (by more than 1% K − 1 in many regions), and it is argued that decreases of this magnitude could result from the land/ocean contrast in surface warming.
Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d1c1094616e40d7b54e27e43b74965e69be1ff58
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Citations in the corpus
- Climate Change, Global Food Security, and the U.S. Food System (2015, positive): “The primary exceptions to this pattern are in regions of tropical Africa, India, and South America, where increases in relative humidity are anticipated (O’Gorman and Muller 2010).”
- Ten-dimensional anthropomorphic arm control in a human brain−machine interface: difficulties, solutions, and limitations (2015, background): “Brain−machine interfaces (BMIs) offer the possibility of bypassing the damaged tissue by decoding movement intention and controlling assistive devices such as computer cursors [1], and, more recently, robotic arms [2–4].”
- Energetic Constraints on Precipitation Under Climate Change (2012, positive): “the Clausius–Clapeyron equation (O’Gorman and Muller 2010).”
- Land–Ocean Warming Contrast over a Wide Range of Climates: Convective Quasi-Equilibrium Theory and Idealized Simulations (2013, positive): “Changes in surface relative humidity under global warming must also be taken into account; decreases of up to 2% K 2 1 over land were found by O’Gorman and Muller (2010) for a multimodel mean of CMIP3 simulations.”