Abstract
Global warming is expected to increase global mean precipitation by
2-4%/K, but this increase may be very uneven, leading to more flooding
but also droughts. Utilizing the Gini index, a metric frequently used in
economics, we analyze the unevenness of precipitation distribution
locally and globally from daily to annual-mean timescale in CMIP6 global
warming simulations. The unevenness of daily precipitation increases in
all models over land and ocean, tropics and extratropics. Local-daily
precipitation unevenness changes show a complex geographic pattern.
However, particularly over land, we show that a simple theoretical
scaling explains this complexity to result from increased precipitation
intensity scaling at about the Clausius-Clapeyron rate, and a local
balance between changes in time-mean precipitation and dry-day fraction.
These results provide a novel perspective on the relation between global
constraints on hydrological cycle to regional precipitation changes
independent of changes in the quasi-stationary atmospheric circulation
and geographic distribution of precipitation.