Journal ArticleDOI
Global Warming and the Weakening of the Tropical Circulation
Gabriel A. Vecchi,Brian J. Soden +1 more
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This article 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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Chapter 12 - Long-term climate change: Projections, commitments and irreversibility
Matthew Collins,R. Knutti,Julie M. Arblaster,J.-L. Dufresne,T. Fichefet,P. Friedlingstein,Xuejie Gao,William J. Gutowski,T. Johns,Gerhard Krinner,Mxolisi Shongwe,C. Tebaldi,A.J. Weaver,M. F. Wehner +13 more
TL;DR: The authors 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 in climate extremes and their impacts on the natural physical environment: An overview of the IPCC SREX report
Sonia I. Seneviratne,Neville Nicholls,David R. Easterling,Clare Goodess,Shinjiro Kanae,James P. Kossin,Yiming Luo,José A. Marengo,Kathleen L. McInnes,Mohammad Rahimi,Markus Reichstein,Asgeir Sorteberg,Carolina Vera,X. Zhang +13 more
Journal ArticleDOI
Increasing frequency of extreme El Niño events due to greenhouse warming
Wenju Cai,Wenju Cai,Simon Borlace,Matthieu Lengaigne,Peter van Rensch,Matthew Collins,Gabriel A. Vecchi,Axel Timmermann,Agus Santoso,Michael J. McPhaden,Lixin Wu,Matthew H. England,Guojian Wang,Guojian Wang,Eric Guilyardi,Eric Guilyardi,Fei-Fei Jin +16 more
TL;DR: This article showed that a doubling in the occurrence of such extreme episodes is caused by increased surface warming of the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, which results in the atmospheric conditions required for these event to occur.
Journal ArticleDOI
Indian Ocean circulation and climate variability
TL;DR: The Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) events are often triggered by ENSO but can also occur independently, subject to eastern tropical preconditioning as mentioned in this paper, and the Indian Ocean has been discovered to have a much larger impact on climate variability than previously thought.
Journal ArticleDOI
The impact of global warming on the tropical Pacific Ocean and El Nino
Mat Collins,Mat Collins,Soon Il An,Wenju Cai,Alexandre Ganachaud,Eric Guilyardi,Fei-Fei Jin,Markus Jochum,Matthieu Lengaigne,Scott B. Power,Axel Timmermann,Gabriel A. Vecchi,Andrew T. Wittenberg +12 more
TL;DR: The El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a naturally occurring fluctuation that originates in the tropical Pacific region and affects ecosystems, agriculture, freshwater supplies, hurricanes and other severe weather events worldwide.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Global analyses of sea surface temperature, sea ice, and night marine air temperature since the late nineteenth century
Nick Rayner,David E. Parker,E. B. Horton,Chris K. Folland,Lisa V. Alexander,David P. Rowell,Elizabeth C. Kent,Alexey Kaplan +7 more
TL;DR: HadISST1 as mentioned in this paper replaces the global sea ice and sea surface temperature (GISST) data sets and is a unique combination of monthly globally complete fields of SST and sea ice concentration on a 1° latitude-longitude grid from 1871.
Journal ArticleDOI
A Dipole Mode in the Tropical Indian Ocean
TL;DR: An analysis of observational data over the past 40 years shows a dipole mode in the Indian Ocean: a pattern of internal variability with anomalously low sea surface temperatures off Sumatra and high seasurface temperatures in the western Indian Ocean, with accompanying wind and precipitation anomalies.
Journal ArticleDOI
Robust Responses of the Hydrological Cycle to Global Warming
Isaac M. Held,Brian J. Soden +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined some aspects of the hydrological cycle that are robust across the models, including the decrease in convective mass fluxes, the increase in horizontal moisture transport, the associated enhancement of the pattern of evaporation minus precipitation and its temporal variance, and decrease in the horizontal sensible heat transport in the extratropics.
Journal ArticleDOI
The simulation of SST, sea ice extents and ocean heat transports in a version of the Hadley Centre coupled model without flux adjustments
C. Gordon,C. Cooper,Catherine A. Senior,Helene T. Banks,Jonathan M. Gregory,T. C. Johns,John F. B. Mitchell,Richard Wood +7 more
TL;DR: A new version of the Hadley Centre coupled model (HadCM3) that does not require flux adjustments to prevent large climate drifts in the simulation is presented in this article.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Community Climate System Model Version 3 (CCSM3)
William D. Collins,Cecilia M. Bitz,Maurice L. Blackmon,Gordon B. Bonan,Christopher S. Bretherton,James A. Carton,Ping Chang,Scott C. Doney,James J. Hack,Tom Henderson,Jeffrey T. Kiehl,William G. Large,Daniel S. McKenna,Benjamin D. Santer,Richard D. Smith +14 more
TL;DR: The Community Climate System Model version 3 (CCSM3) as discussed by the authors is a coupled climate model with components representing the atmosphere, ocean, sea ice, and land surface connected by a flux coupler.
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