Uncertainty in projected changes in precipitation minus evaporation:
dominant role of dynamic circulation changes and weak role for
thermodynamic changes
Abstract
End of century projections from Coupled Model Intercomparison Project
(CMIP) models show a decrease in precipitation over subtropical oceans
that often extends into surrounding land areas, but with substantial
intermodel spread. Changes in precipitation are controlled by both
thermodynamical and dynamical processes, though the importance of these
processes for regional scales and for intermodel spread is not well
understood. The contribution of dynamic and thermodynamic processes to
the model spread in regional precipitation minus evaporation (P-E) is
computed for 48 CMIP models. The intermodel spread is dominated
essentially everywhere by the change of the dynamic term, including in
most regions where thermodynamic changes dominate the multi-model mean
response. The dominant role of dynamic changes is insensitive to zonal
averaging which removes any influence of stationary wave changes, and is
also evident in subtropical oceanic regions. Relatedly, intermodel
spread in P-E is generally unrelated to climate sensitivity.