Mediterranean water cycle changes: transition to drier 21st century conditions in observations and CMIP3 simulations
By A. Mariotti, N. Zeng, Jinho Yoon, V. Artale, Antonio Navarra, Pinhas Alpert, Laurent Z. X. Li. 2008
254 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We use CMIP3 multi-model simulations to show how individual hydroclimatic changes will concur to determine even greater alterations of 21st century Mediterranean water cycle characteristics, with contrasting behavior over land and sea. By 2070–2099, the average of the models predicts a 20% decrease in land surface water availability and a 24% increase in the loss of fresh water over the Mediterranean Sea due to precipitation reduction and warming-enhanced evaporation, with a remarkably high consensus among analyzed models. The projected decrease in river runoff from the surrounding land will further exacerbate the increase in Mediterranean Sea fresh water deficit. 20th century simulations indicate that the ‘transition’ toward drier conditions has already started to occur and has accelerated around the turn of the century towards the larger rates projected for the 21st century. These tendencies are supported by observational evidence of century-long negative trends in regionally averaged precipitation, PDSI and discharge from numerous rivers; and are consistent with reported increases in Mediterranean sea water salinity.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Oceanography, Water Science and Technology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d229d276c5f38cbde4961591237eb77c9a2ffed2
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Global and Planetary Change
In Oceanography
Citations in the corpus
- Two tales of initializing decadal climate predictions experiments with the ECHAM5/MPI-OM model (2012, background): “More information on the iterative forcing approach can be found in Haak et al. (2003).”