Current changes in tropical precipitation
By Richard P. Allan, Brian J. Soden, Viju O. John, W. Ingram, P. Good. 2010
245 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Current changes in tropical precipitation from satellite data and climate models are assessed. Wet and dry regions of the tropics are defined as the highest 30% and lowest 70% of monthly precipitation values. Observed tropical ocean trends in the wet regime (1.8%/decade) and the dry regions (−2.6%/decade) according to the Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP) over the period including Special Sensor Microwave Imager (SSM/I) data (1988–2008), where GPCP is believed to be more reliable, are of smaller magnitude than when including the entire time series (1979–2008) and closer to model simulations than previous comparisons. Analysing changes in extreme precipitation using daily data within the wet regions, an increase in the frequency of the heaviest 6% of events with warming for the SSM/I observations and model ensemble mean is identified. The SSM/I data indicate an increased frequency of the heaviest events with warming, several times larger than the expected Clausius–Clapeyron scaling and at the upper limit of the substantial range in responses in the model simulations.
Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/86e29ea3f02f688139bf897e49184c412837afb5
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Citations in the corpus
- Observed and simulated precipitation responses in wet and dry regions 1850–2100 (2013, methodology): “…a simplified approach to analyse separately changes in the wet and dry regions, defined dynamically each month as the 30% of wettest grid points and 70% of driest grid points within the tropics, based upon gridded P (Allan et al 2010) or considering precipitation minus evaporation ( P − E ) fields.”
- CMIP5 historical simulations (1850–2012) with GISS ModelE2 (2014, result): “This spatial pattern is consistent with trends calculated from Global Precipitation Climatology Project retrievals [Allan et al., 2010], and theoretical expectations of precipitation sensitivity to increasing temperature and net radiation into the surface [Held and Soden, 2006].”
- Energetic Constraints on Precipitation Under Climate Change (2012, background): “…(e.g., Sun et al. 2007), and there is observational evidence for decreases in mean precipitation in tropical regions with mean descent (e.g., Allan et al. 2010), but it is important to note that the precipitation distribution could adjust in ways other than a simple decrease in frequency…”
- Precipitation Extremes Under Climate Change (2015, background): “ulate the interannual variability in tropical precipitation extremes when compared to observations [2,3], and the disproportionate increases in precipitation extremes compared to other parts of the precipitation distribution that is found in some models – an “extreme mode” in the tropical response t”
- Physically Consistent Responses of the Global Atmospheric Hydrological Cycle in Models and Observations (2014, background): “This definition of wet and dry regimes is based upon the analysis of Allan et al. (2010) but is somewhat arbitrary.”