On the tropical origin of uncertainties in the global land precipitation response to global warming

Abstract

Understanding the response of the global hydrological cycle to recent and future anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols is a major challenge for the climate modelling community. Recent climate scenarios produced for the fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are analysed here to explore the geographical origin of, and the possible reasons for, uncertainties in the hydrological model response to global warming. Using the twentieth century simulations and the SRES-A2 scenarios from eight different coupled ocean–atmosphere models, it is shown that the main uncertainties originate from the tropics, where even the sign of the zonal mean precipitation change remains uncertain over land. Given the large interannual fluctuations of tropical precipitation, it is then suggested that the El Niño Southern Ocillation (ENSO) variability can be used as a surrogate of climate change to better constrain the model reponse. While the simulated sensitivity of global land precipitation to global mean surface temperature indeed shows a remarkable similarity between the interannual and climate change timescales respectively, the model ability to capture the ENSO-precipitation relationship is not a major constraint on the global hydrological projections. Only the model that exhibits the highest precipitation sensitivity clearly appears as an outlier. Besides deficiencies in the simulation of the ENSO-tropical rainfall teleconnections, the study indicates that uncertainties in the twenty-first century evolution of these teleconnections represent an important contribution to the model spread, thus emphasizing the need for improving the simulation of the tropical Pacific variability to provide more reliable scenarios of the global hydrological cycle. It also suggests that validating the mean present-day climate is not sufficient to assess the reliability of climate projections, and that interannual variability is another suitable and possibly more useful candidate for constraining the model response. Finally, it is shown that uncertainties in precipitation change are, like precipitation itself, very unevenly distributed over the globe, the most vulnerable countries sometimes being those where the anticipated precipitation changes are the most uncertain.