Ocean Salinities Reveal Strong Global Water Cycle Intensification During 1950 to 2000

By P. Durack, S. Wijffels, R. Matear. Science, 2012

958 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Getting Wetter Faster Theoretical projections, based on the relationship between temperature and the amount of water vapor the atmosphere can hold, suggest that global warming should intensify the strength of the atmospheric water cycle by about twice the rate as the thermodynamics and climate models predict. Durack et al. (p. 455) examined 50 years of observations of sea surface salinities and conclude that the patterns of change in the salinity data are consistent with the theoretical projections, rather than with those of the models. Thus, the global water cycle should intensify by 16 to 24% for a future increase of a global average temperature of 2 to 3°C. Global sea surface salinity changes show that the water cycle has sped up markedly in the past 50 years. Fundamental thermodynamics and climate models suggest that dry regions will become drier and wet regions will become wetter in response to warming. Efforts to detect this long-term response in sparse surface observations of rainfall and evaporation remain ambiguous. We show that ocean salinity patterns express an identifiable fingerprint of an intensifying water cycle. Our 50-year observed global surface salinity changes, combined with changes from global climate models, present robust evidence of an intensified global water cycle at a rate of 8 ± 5% per degree of surface warming. This rate is double the response projected by current-generation climate models and suggests that a substantial (16 to 24%) intensification of the global water cycle will occur in a future 2° to 3° warmer world.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8b3c3fede75ed4f99f9c55c6e20edfeb2505884c

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Citations in the corpus

OMIP contribution to CMIP6: experimental and diagnostic protocol for the physical component of the Ocean Model Intercomparison Project (2016, background): “These measurements also point to persistent salinity changes (e.g. Hosoda et al., 2009; Durack and Wijffels, 2010; Helm et al., 2010; Skliris et al., 2014), hypothesized to result from water cycle amplification (Stott et al., 2008; Durack et al., 2012; Pierce et al., 2012; Terray et al., 2012).”
Observed and simulated precipitation responses in wet and dry regions 1850–2100 (2013, background): “Changes in P − E are variable over the 20th century where warming is relatively weak although small increases in P − E in the wet region since 1950 (excluding years affected by volcanic cooling) are in agreement with simulated and observed ampliﬁcation of salinity patterns (Durack et al 2012).”
Disentangling climatic and anthropogenic controls on global terrestrial evapotranspiration trends (2015, background): “Intensified global hydrological cycle has been observed and modeled during the past few years (Huntington 2006, Gerten et al 2008, Wang et al 2010, Durack et al 2012, Douville et al 2013, Sterling et al 2013, Wu et al 2013, Gedney et al 2014).”