Understanding Decreases in Land Relative Humidity with Global Warming: Conceptual Model and GCM Simulations

By M. Byrne, P. O’Gorman. 2016

227 citations recorded by the source corpus.

AbstractClimate models simulate a strong land–ocean contrast in the response of near-surface relative humidity to global warming; relative humidity tends to increase slightly over oceans but decrease substantially over land. Surface energy balance arguments have been used to understand the response over ocean but are difficult to apply over more complex land surfaces. Here, a conceptual box model is introduced, involving atmospheric moisture transport between the land and ocean and surface evapotranspiration, to investigate the decreases in land relative humidity as the climate warms. The box model is applied to simulations with idealized and full-complexity (CMIP5) general circulation models, and it is found to capture many of the features of the simulated changes in land humidity. The simplest version of the box model gives equal fractional increases in specific humidity over land and ocean. This relationship implies a decrease in land relative humidity given the greater warming over land than ocean and...

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Water Science and Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/167c656cc61884470316f83e089b5616c0da37d1

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Citations in the corpus

• Moist Heat Stress on a Hotter Earth (2020, background): “It has been proposed that slightly lower average RH is expected in future climates (Byrne & O’Gorman 2013, 2016), which is reflected in Figure 8 ; here, T 95 has a median slope of 1.3, and RH 95 is − 0.3, resulting in 0.3% drying per degree of warming.”
• Maize yield under a changing climate: The hidden role of vapor pressure deficit (2018, background): “However, projections suggest decreasing relative humidity over land under a warmer climate (Byrne and O’Gorman 2016) which would lead to even larger increases in VPD.”