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Global Warming and the Weakening of the Tropical Circulation
Gabriel A. Vecchi,Brian J. Soden +1 more
- Vol. 2007
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TLDR
The authors examined the response of the tropical atmospheric and oceanic circulation to increasing greenhouse gases using a coordinated set of twenty-first-century climate model experiments performed for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4).Abstract:
This study examines the response of the tropical atmospheric and oceanic circulation to increasing greenhouse gases using a coordinated set of twenty-first-century climate model experiments performed for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). The strength of the atmospheric overturning circulation decreases as the climate warms in all IPCC AR4 models, in a manner consistent with the thermodynamic scaling arguments of Held and Soden. The weakening occurs preferentially in the zonally asymmetric (i.e., Walker) rather than zonal-mean (i.e., Hadley) component of the tropical circulation and is shown to induce substantial changes to the thermal structure and circulation of the tropical oceans. Evidence suggests that the overall circulation weakens by decreasing the frequency of strong updrafts and increasing the frequency of weak updrafts, although the robustness of this behavior across all models cannot be confirmed because of the lack of data. As the cli...read more
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Global Warming Pattern Formation: Sea Surface Temperature and Rainfall
TL;DR: In this paper, spatial variations in sea surface temperature (SST) and rainfall changes over the tropics are investigated based on ensemble simulations for the first half of the twenty-first century under the greenhouse gas emission scenario A1B with coupled ocean-atmosphere general circulation models of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) and National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
Anthropogenic aerosols and the weakening of the South Asian summer monsoon
TL;DR: This article used a series of climate model experiments to investigate the South Asian monsoon response to natural and anthropogenic forcings, and found that the observed precipitation decrease can be attributed mainly to human-influenced aerosol emissions.
Response of the zonal mean atmospheric circulation to El Nino versus global warming
TL;DR: In contrast to the strengthening and contraction of the Hadley cell and the equatorward shift of the tropospheric zonal jets in response to El Nino forcing, the hadley cell weakens and expands poleward, and the jets move poleward in a warmed climate, despite the projected “El Nino-like” enhanced warming over the equatorial central and eastern Pacific.
Future change of western North Pacific typhoons: Projections by a 20-km-mesh global atmospheric model
TL;DR: In this article, future changes in tropical cyclone activity over the western North Pacific (WNP) under the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) A1B emission scenario were investigated using a 20km-mesh, very-high-resolution Meteorological Research Institute (MRI)-Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) atmospheric general circulation model.
Robust future precipitation declines in CMIP5 largely reflect the poleward expansion of model subtropical dry zones
TL;DR: This paper showed that robust subtropical precipitation declines have been a prominent feature of general circulation model (GCM) responses to future greenhouse warming, and extended this work to 36 new CMIP5 models, and found that these robust precipitation declines are also found mainly between sub- tropical minima and midlatitude precipitation maxima, implicating dynamic poleward expansion of dry zones rather than thermodynamic amplification of dry-wet contrasts.
References
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