Robust Responses of the Hydrological Cycle to Global Warming
Isaac M. Held,Brian J. Soden +1 more
TLDR
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.Abstract:
Using the climate change experiments generated for the Fourth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, this study examines some aspects of the changes in the hydrological cycle that are robust across the models. These responses include 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 the decrease in the horizontal sensible heat transport in the extratropics. A surprising finding is that a robust decrease in extratropical sensible heat transport is found only in the equilibrium climate response, as estimated in slab ocean responses to the doubling of CO2, and not in transient climate change scenarios. All of these robust responses are consequences of the increase in lower-tropospheric water vapor.read more
Citations
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Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
TL;DR: 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.
Journal ArticleDOI
Stationarity Is Dead: Whither Water Management?
Paul C.D. Milly,Julio L. Betancourt,Malin Falkenmark,Robert M. Hirsch,Dennis P. Lettenmaier,Ronald J. Stouffer +5 more
TL;DR: Climate change undermines a basic assumption that historically has facilitated management of water supplies, demands, and risks and threatens to derail efforts to conserve and manage water resources.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project
Gilbert P. Compo,Gilbert P. Compo,Jeffrey S. Whitaker,Prashant D. Sardeshmukh,Prashant D. Sardeshmukh,N. Matsui,N. Matsui,Rob Allan,Xiaojun Yin,Byron E. Gleason,Russell S. Vose,Glenn Rutledge,P. Bessemoulin,Stefan Brönnimann,Stefan Brönnimann,Manola Brunet,Manola Brunet,R. Crouthamel,Andrea Grant,Pavel Ya. Groisman,Pavel Ya. Groisman,Philip Jones,Michael C. Kruk,Andries Kruger,Gareth J. Marshall,Maurizio Maugeri,H. Mok,Øyvind Nordli,Tom Ross,Ricardo M. Trigo,Xiaolan L. Wang,Scott D. Woodruff,Steven J. Worley +32 more
TL;DR: The Twentieth Century Reanalysis (20CR) dataset as discussed by the authors provides the first estimates of global tropospheric variability, and of the dataset's time-varying quality, from 1871 to the present at 6-hourly temporal and 2° spatial resolutions.
Journal ArticleDOI
Irreversible climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions
TL;DR: The climate change that takes place due to increases in carbon dioxide concentration is largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop, showing that thermal expansion of the warming ocean provides a conservative lower limit to irreversible global average sea level rise.
Journal ArticleDOI
Changes in precipitation with climate change
TL;DR: There is a direct influence of global warming on precipitation as mentioned in this paper, as the water holding capacity of air increases by about 7% per 1°C warming, which leads to increased water vapor in the atmosphere.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Aerosols, climate, and the hydrological cycle
TL;DR: Human activities are releasing tiny particles (aerosols) into the atmosphere that enhance scattering and absorption of solar radiation, which can lead to a weaker hydrological cycle, which connects directly to availability and quality of fresh water, a major environmental issue of the 21st century.
Journal ArticleDOI
Constraints on future changes in climate and the hydrologic cycle
Myles R. Allen,William Ingram +1 more
TL;DR: It will be substantially harder to quantify the range of possible changes in the hydrologic cycle than in global-mean temperature, both because the observations are less complete and because the physical constraints are weaker.
Journal ArticleDOI
Water vapor feedback and global warming
Isaac M. Held,Brian J. Soden +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors describe the background behind the prevailing view on water vapor feedback and some of the arguments raised by its critics, and attempt to explain why these arguments have not modified the consensus within the climate research community.
Journal ArticleDOI
An Assessment of Climate Feedbacks in Coupled Ocean–Atmosphere Models
Brian J. Soden,Isaac M. Held +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the climate feedbacks in coupled ocean-atmosphere models are compared using a coordinated set of twenty-first-century climate change experiments, and it is found that water vapor is the largest positive feedback in all models and its strength is consistent with that expected from constant relative humidity changes in the water vapor mixing ratio.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Effects of Doubling the CO2 Concentration on the climate of a General Circulation Model
TL;DR: In this paper, an attempt is made to estimate the temperature changes resulting from doubling the present CO2 concentration by the use of a simplified three-dimensional general circulation model, which contains the following simplications: a limited computational domain, an idealized topography, no beat transport by ocean currents, and fixed cloudiness.
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