Assessing the Robustness of Future Extreme Precipitation Intensification in the CMIP5 Ensemble

Bador, Margot; Donat, Markus G.; Geoffroy, Olivier; Alexander, Lisa V.

doi:10.1175/jcli-d-17-0683.1

Cited by 54 publications

(44 citation statements)

References 71 publications

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“…S8a,c). Earlier studies have also found a larger spread of extreme precipitation changes in dry regions compared wet regions 14,37 . The increasing total uncertainty with decreasing water availability is attributed to the increasing trend of both its components (GCM and hazard quantification method); however, the GCM uncertainty has a much larger contribution in all regions.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 74%

Climate change impact on flood and extreme precipitation increases with water availability

Tabari

2020

Sci Rep

741

259

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The hydrological cycle is expected to intensify with global warming, which likely increases the intensity of extreme precipitation events and the risk of flooding. The changes, however, often differ from the theorized expectation of increases in water‐holding capacity of the atmosphere in the warmer conditions, especially when water availability is limited. Here, the relationships of changes in extreme precipitation and flood intensities for the end of the twenty-first century with spatial and seasonal water availability are quantified. Results show an intensification of extreme precipitation and flood events over all climate regions which increases as water availability increases from dry to wet regions. Similarly, there is an increase in the intensification of extreme precipitation and flood with the seasonal cycle of water availability. The connection between extreme precipitation and flood intensity changes and spatial and seasonal water availability becomes stronger as events become less extreme.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 74%

Climate change impact on flood and extreme precipitation increases with water availability

Tabari

2020

Sci Rep

741

259

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…associated with extreme precipitation in low-and high-resolution models in order to gain a better understanding of why higher resolutions generally lead to more intense, and sometimes less realistic, precipitation extremes. Meanwhile, given the widely different skills of climate models in capturing extreme precipitation, our study illustrates how a careful model selection might be necessary when dealing with precipitation extremes and their response to global warming that is largely uncertain over most regions of the globe (Bador et al, 2018;Collins et al, 2013;IPCC, 2013;.…”

Section: Journal Of Geophysical Research: Atmospheresmentioning

confidence: 98%

Impact of Higher Spatial Atmospheric Resolution on Precipitation Extremes Over Land in Global Climate Models

et al. 2020

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Finer grids in global climate models could lead to an improvement in the simulation of precipitation extremes. We assess the influence on model performance of increasing spatial resolution by evaluating pairs of high‐ and low‐resolution forced atmospheric simulations from six global climate models (generally the latest CMIP6 version) on a common 1° × 1° grid. The differences in tuning between the lower and higher resolution versions are as limited as possible, which allows the influence of higher resolution to be assessed exclusively. We focus on the 1985–2014 climatology of annual extremes of daily precipitation over global land, and models are compared to observations from different sources (i.e., in situ‐based and satellite‐based) to enable consideration of observational uncertainty. Finally, we address regional features of model performance based on four indices characterizing different aspects of precipitation extremes. Our analysis highlights good agreement between models that precipitation extremes are more intense at higher resolution. We find that the spread among observations is substantial and can be as large as intermodel differences, which makes the quantitative evaluation of model performance difficult. However, consistently across the four precipitation extremes indices that we investigate, models often show lower skill at higher resolution compared to their corresponding lower resolution version. Our findings suggest that increasing spatial resolution alone is not sufficient to obtain a systematic improvement in the simulation of precipitation extremes, and other improvements (e.g., physics and tuning) may be required.

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“…The spatial patterns of change, however, are heterogeneous across datasets, and precipitation changes at local and regional scales remain uncertain (Fischer et al 2013, Pfahl et al 2017. Increasing intensity of heavy precipitation extremes has been documented, robust across observations and global climate models, when aggregating over the wet and dry regions of the world that were defined based on the climatological distributions of total and extreme precipitation (Donat et al 2016b, Bador et al 2018, Lehtonen and Jylhä 2019. There is, however, no standard definition for 'wet' and 'dry', and in particular dryness is often considered in a water availability sense as the difference of water supply through precipitation and atmospheric water demand through evapotranspiration (Thornthwaite 1948, Budyko 1974.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intensification of precipitation extremes in the world’s humid and water-limited regions

Donat

Angélil

Ukkola

2019

Environ. Res. Lett.

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Changes in precipitation totals and extremes are among the most relevant consequences of climate change, but in particular regional changes remain uncertain. While aggregating over larger regions reduces the noise in time series and typically shows increases in the intensity of precipitation extremes, it has been argued that this may not be the case in water-limited regions. Here we investigate longterm changes in annual precipitation totals and extremes aggregated over the world's humid, transitional, and dry regions as defined by their climatological water availability. We use the globally most complete observational datasets suitable for the analysis of daily precipitation extremes, and data from global climate model simulations. We show that precipitation totals and extremes have increased in the humid regions since the mid-20th century. Conversely, despite showing tendencies to increase, no robust changes can be detected in the drier regions, in part due to the large variability of precipitation and sparse observational coverage particularly in the driest regions. Future climate simulations under increased radiative forcing indicate total precipitation increases in more humid regions but no clear changes in the more arid regions, while precipitation extremes are more likely to increase than to decrease on average over both the humid and arid regions of the world. These results highlight the increasing risk of heavy precipitation in most regions of the world, including waterlimited regions, with implications for related impacts through flooding risk or soil erosion.

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Assessing the Robustness of Future Extreme Precipitation Intensification in the CMIP5 Ensemble

Cited by 54 publications

References 71 publications

Climate change impact on flood and extreme precipitation increases with water availability

Climate change impact on flood and extreme precipitation increases with water availability

Impact of Higher Spatial Atmospheric Resolution on Precipitation Extremes Over Land in Global Climate Models

Intensification of precipitation extremes in the world’s humid and water-limited regions

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