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How do weather characteristics change in a warming climate?

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Abstract

The possible change in the characteristics of weather in the future should be considered as important as the mean climate change because the increasing risk of extremes is related to the variability on daily time scales. The weather characteristics can be represented by the climatological mean interdiurnal (day-to-day) variability (MIDV). This paper first assessed the phase five of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project coupled climate models’ capability to represent MIDV for the surface maximum and minimum temperature, surface wind speed and precipitation under the present climate condition. Based on the assessment, we selected three best models for projecting future change. We found that the future changes in MIDV are characterized by: (a) a marked reduction in surface maximum and minimum temperature over high latitudes during the cold season; (b) a stronger reduction in the surface minimum temperature than in the maximum temperature; (c) a reduction in surface wind speed over large parts of lands in Northern Hemisphere (NH) during NH spring; (d) a noticeable increase in precipitation in NH mid-high latitudes in NH spring and winter, and in particular over East Asia throughout most of the year.

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Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling, which is responsible for CMIP, and we thank the climate modeling groups (listed in Table 1 of this paper) for producing and making available their model output. For CMIP the U.S. Department of Energy’s Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison provides coordinating support and led development of software infrastructure in partnership with the Global Organization for Earth System Science Portals. B.W. acknowledges support provided by APEC Climate Center through Climate Prediction and its Application to Society (CliPAS) project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. APEC Climate Center (APCC), 12 Centum 7-ro, Haeundae-gu, Busan, 612-020, Republic of Korea

    Ok-Yeon Kim & Sun-Hee Shin

  2. Department of Meteorology, International Pacific Research Center (IPRC), University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI, 96822, USA

    Bin Wang

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  1. Ok-Yeon Kim
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Correspondence to Ok-Yeon Kim.

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Kim, OY., Wang, B. & Shin, SH. How do weather characteristics change in a warming climate?. Clim Dyn 41, 3261–3281 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-013-1795-8

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