Abstract
IPCC reports and climate change impact studies generally exploit ensembles of climate projections based on different socio-economic pathways and climate models, which provide the temporal evolution of plausible future climates. However, The Paris Agreement and many national and international commitments consider adaptation and mitigation plans targeting future global warming levels. Model uncertainty and scenario uncertainty typically affect both the crossing-time of future warming levels and the climate features at a given global warming level. In this study, we assess the uncertainties in a multi-model multi-member CMIP6 ensemble (MME) of seasonal and regional temperature and precipitation projections. In particular, we show that the uncertainties of regional temperature projections are considerably reduced if considered at a specific global warming level, with a limited effect of the emission scenarios and a reduced influence of GCM sensitivity. We also describe in detail the large uncertainties related to the different behavior of the GCMs in some regions.
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Data availability
All datasets used in this research can be accessed via the following websites: CMIP6 model outputs at https://esgf-node.ipsl.upmc.fr/projects/cmip6-ipsl/. Access to HadCRUT5 dataset is detailed in Morice et al. (2021).
Code availability
Average temperatures at the planetary level and seasonal values at the \(1^{\circ } \times 1^{\circ }\) grid scale are obtained from GCM simulations using Climate Data Operators (CDO Schulzweida 2023). The cubic splines are applied with the function smooth.spline in R software (R Core Team 2022) with the df argument equal to 6. The QUALYPSO package is available at https://cran.r-project.org/package=QUALYPSO.
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Acknowledgements
We thank B. Hingray at IGE for previous discussions on this subject and his feedback on the last version of the manuscript. We thank the two anonymous reviewers for their useful and constructive comments.
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GE contributed to the initial version of the study (material preparation, data collection, and analysis). All authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript and approved the final manuscript.
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Evin, G., Ribes, A. & Corre, L. Assessing CMIP6 uncertainties at global warming levels. Clim Dyn 62, 8057–8072 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-024-07323-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-024-07323-x