Drafting Authors: Neil Adger, Pramod Aggarwal, Shardul Agrawala, Joseph Alcamo, Abdelkader Allali, Oleg Anisimov, Nigel Arnell, Michel Boko, Osvaldo Canziani, Timothy Carter, Gino Casassa, Ulisses Confalonieri, Rex Victor Cruz, Edmundo de Alba Alcaraz, William Easterling, Christopher Field, Andreas Fischlin, Blair Fitzharris, Carlos Gay García, Clair Hanson, Hideo Harasawa, Kevin Hennessy, Saleemul Huq, Roger Jones, Lucka Kajfež Bogataj, David Karoly, Richard Klein, Zbigniew Kundzewicz, Murari Lal, Rodel Lasco, Geoff Love, Xianfu Lu, Graciela Magrín, Luis José Mata, Roger McLean, Bettina Menne, Guy Midgley, Nobuo Mimura, Monirul Qader Mirza, José Moreno, Linda Mortsch, Isabelle Niang-Diop, Robert Nicholls, Béla Nováky, Leonard Nurse, Anthony Nyong, Michael Oppenheimer, Jean Palutikof, Martin Parry, Anand Patwardhan, Patricia Romero Lankao, Cynthia Rosenzweig, Stephen Schneider, Serguei Semenov, Joel Smith, John Stone, Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, David Vaughan, Coleen Vogel, Thomas Wilbanks, Poh Poh Wong, Shaohong Wu, Gary Yohe

Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Cause, conseguenze e strategie di mitigazione Proponiamo il primo di una serie di articoli in cui affronteremo l’attuale problema dei mutamenti climatici. Presentiamo il documento redatto, votato e pubblicato dall’Ipcc - Comitato intergovernativo sui cambiamenti climatici - che illustra la sintesi delle ricerche svolte su questo tema rilevante.

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Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis.

This chapter assesses long-term projections of climate change for the end of the 21st century and beyond, where the forced signal depends on the scenario and is typically larger than the internal variability of the climate system. Changes are expressed with respect to a baseline period of 1986-2005, unless otherwise stated.

Chapter 12 - Long-term climate change: Projections, commitments and irreversibility

For base year 2010, anthropogenic activities created ~210 (190 to 230) TgN of reactive nitrogen Nr from N2. This human-caused creation of reactive nitrogen in 2010 is at least 2 times larger than the rate of natural terrestrial creation of ~58 TgN (50 to 100 TgN yr−1) (Table 6.9, Section 1a). Note that the estimate of natural terrestrial biological fixation (58 TgN yr−1) is lower than former estimates (100 TgN yr−1, Galloway et al., 2004), but the ranges overlap, 50 to 100 TgN yr−1 vs. 90 to 120 TgN yr−1, respectively). Of this created reactive nitrogen, NOx and NH3 emissions from anthropogenic sources are about fourfold greater than natural emissions (Table 6.9, Section 1b). A greater portion of the NH3 emissions is deposited to the continents rather than to the oceans, relative to the deposition of NOy, due to the longer atmospheric residence time of the latter. These deposition estimates are lower limits, as they do not include organic nitrogen species. New model and measurement information (Kanakidou et al., 2012) suggests that incomplete inclusion of emissions and atmospheric chemistry of reduced and oxidized organic nitrogen components in current models may lead to systematic underestimates of total global reactive nitrogen deposition by up to 35% (Table 6.9, Section 1c). Discharge of reactive nitrogen to the coastal oceans is ~45 TgN yr−1 (Table 6.9, Section 1d). Denitrification converts Nr back to atmospheric N2. The current estimate for the production of atmospheric N2 is 110 TgN yr−1 (Bouwman et al., 2013).

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Carbon and Other Biogeochemical Cycles

Glacial melting in the Tibetan Plateau affects the water resources of millions of people. This study finds that—partly owing to changes in atmospheric circulations and precipitation patterns—the most intensive glacier shrinkage is in the Himalayan region, whereas glacial retreat in the Pamir Plateau region is less apparent.

Different glacier status with atmospheric circulations in Tibetan Plateau and surroundings

Any skillful prediction is of great benefit to North China, a region that is densely populated and greatly impacted by droughts. This paper reports potential predictability of North China s...

Potential Predictability of North China Summer Drought

Variability in soil moisture has implications for regional terrestrial environments under a warming climate. This paper focuses on the spatiotemporal variability in the intra-annual persistence of soil moisture in China using the fifth-generation reanalysis dataset by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts for the period 1979–2018. The results show that in China, the mean intra-annual persistence in the humid to arid zones increased from 60 to 115 days in the lower layer but decreased from 19 to 13 days and from 25 to 14 days in the upper and root layers, respectively. However, these changes were strongly attenuated in extremely dry and wet regions due to the scarcity of soil moisture anomalies. Large changes in persistence occurred in the lower soil layer in dryland areas, with a mean difference of up to 40 days between the 2010s and the 1980s. Overall increasing trends dominated the large-scale spatial features, despite regional decreases in the eastern arid zone and the North and Northeast China plains. In the root layer, the two plains experienced an expanded decrease while on the Tibetan Plateau it was dominated by decadal variability. These contrasting changes between the lower and root layers along the periphery of the transition zone was a reflection of the enhanced soil hydrological cycle in the root layer. The enhanced persistence in drylands lower layer is an indication of the intensified impacts of soil moisture anomalies (e.g., droughts) on terrestrial water cycle. These findings may help the understanding of climate change impacts on terrestrial environments.

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Changes in Soil Moisture Persistence in China over the Past 40 Years under a Warming Climate

The present study investigates the fidelity and resolution sensitivity of Met Office Unified Model Global Atmosphere 3.0 in simulating the intra-seasonal oscillation (ISO) of the East Asia and western North Pacific summer monsoon. Two sets of model simulations at horizontal resolutions of N216 (60km) and N96 (130km) forced by observed daily high-resolution sea surface temperature are examined and compared with the observations. Diagnostic results show that the model can well reproduce the gross spatio-temporal features of observed summer ISO over the East Asia and western North Pacific in terms of period, dominant REOF mode, variance, northward propagation, cycle evolution and vertical structure. The intra-seasonal change in intensity and position of western North Pacific Subtropical High and upper troposphere westerly jet associated with the northward propagating ISOs are also reasonably captured in the model. Moreover, increasing horizontal resolution improves most aspects of the ISO simulation, especially the intensity and northward propagation of the ISO-related convection and circulation systems. Further analysis indicates that the improvement as resolution increases is related to the weakening in background state of East Asian summer monsoon, which is due to the realistic simulation of land-sea thermal contrast at higher resolution model. This study suggests that enhanced model resolution can have some beneficial impacts on the ISO simulation.

https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/qj.2927

High-resolution simulation of the boreal summer intraseasonal oscillation in Met Office Unified Model

In a globally warming world, subtropical regions are generally expected to become drier while the tropics and mid–high latitudes become wetter. In line with this, Southwest China, close to 25°N, is expected to become increasingly prone to drought if annual mean precipitation decreases. However, despite this trend, changes in the temporal distribution of moisture supply might actually result in increased extreme rainfall in the region, whose climate is characterized by distinct dry and wet seasons. Using hourly and daily gauge observations, rainfall intensity changes since 1971 are examined for a network of 142 locations in the region. From the analysis, dry season changes are negligible but wet season changes exhibit a significantly strong downward trend [−2.4% (10 yr)−1], particularly during the past 15 years [−17.7% (10 yr)−1]. However, the intensity of events during the wettest of 5% hours appears to steadily increase during the whole period [1.4% (10 yr)−1], tying in with government statistical reports of recent droughts and flooding. If the opposing trends are a consequence of a warming climate, it is reasonable to expect the contradictory trend to continue with an enhanced risk of flash flooding in coming decades in the region concerned.

Increasing Flash Floods in a Drying Climate over Southwest China

The intra-seasonal oscillation (ISO) is a prominent feature of the East Asia summer monsoon. The Beijing Climate Center model is one of the IPCC models participating in the Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project (CMIP) 3 and CMIP5 experiments. This paper presents a systematic evaluation of ISO simulated by the Beijing Climate Center atmospheric general circulation model version 2.2 against observations. The model reasonably simulates some salient features of BSISO in terms of temporal spectrum, leading EOF modes, and vertical structure, however limitations are also evident. The strength of the BSISO is overestimated and the northward propagating rain belt is tilted southwest-northeast, which is also different from the observation. The model tends to produce unrealistically strong but shallow convection associated with the ISO, leading to a northward shift of the Western Pacific Subtropical High and the main rain band compared to observations. Process studies show that the anomalous convective heating associated with the wet model bias drives a Gill-type response, resulting in the northwesterly biased position of Western Pacific Subtropical High. The study has revealed how the interaction of moist processes and large-scale dynamics can lead to model bias in simulating the east Asian regional climate system and its variability (ISO in particular). Future improvements in model resolution and convection parameterization are expected to reduce such errors.

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Peili Wu

Papers

Potential Predictability of North China Summer Drought

Changes in Soil Moisture Persistence in China over the Past 40 Years under a Warming Climate

High-resolution simulation of the boreal summer intraseasonal oscillation in Met Office Unified Model

Increasing Flash Floods in a Drying Climate over Southwest China

An evaluation of boreal summer intra-seasonal oscillation simulated by BCC_AGCM2.2