Search

The impacts of sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies and anthropogenic greenhouse gases on the likelihood of extreme drought occurring in the central United States in the year 2012 were investigated using large-ensemble simulations from a global atmospheric climate model. Two sets of experiments were conducted. In the first, the simulated hydroclimate of 2012 was compared to a baseline period (1986–2014) to investigate the impact of SSTs. In the second, the hydroclimate in a world with 2012-level anthropogenic forcing was compared to five “counterfactual” versions of a 2012 world under preindustrial forcing. SST anomalies in 2012 increased the simulated likelihood of an extreme summer precipitation deficit (e.g., the deficit with a 2% exceedance probability) by a factor of 5. The likelihood of an extreme summer soil moisture deficit increased by a similar amount, due in great part to a large spring soil moisture deficit carrying over into summer. An anthropogenic impact on precipitation was detectable in the simulations, doubling the likelihood of what would have been a rainfall deficit with a 2% exceedance probability under preindustrial-level forcings. Despite this reduction in rainfall, summer soil moisture during extreme drought was essentially unaffected by anthropogenic forcing because of 1) evapotranspiration declining roughly one-to-one with a decrease in precipitation due to severe water supply constraint and despite higher evaporative demand and 2) a decrease in stomatal conductance, and therefore a decrease in potential transpiration, with higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations.

Atmospheric modes of variability relevant for extreme temperature and precipitation events are evaluated in models currently being used for extreme event attribution. A 100 member initial condition ensemble of the global circulation model HadAM3P is compared with both the multi-model ensemble from the Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project, Phase 5 (CMIP5) and the CMIP5 atmosphere-only counterparts (AMIP5). The use of HadAM3P allows for huge ensembles to be computed relatively fast, thereby providing unique insights into the dynamics of extremes. The analysis focuses on mid Northern Latitudes (primarily Europe) during winter, and is compared with ERA-Interim reanalysis. The tri-modal Atlantic eddy-driven jet distribution is remarkably well captured in HadAM3P, but not so in the CMIP5 or AMIP5 multi-model mean, although individual models fare better. The well known underestimation of blocking in the Atlantic region is apparent in CMIP5 and AMIP5, and also, to a lesser extent, in HadAM3P. Pacific blocking features are well produced in all modeling initiatives. Blocking duration is biased towards models reproducing too many short-lived events in all three modelling systems. Associated storm tracks are too zonal over the Atlantic in the CMIP5 and AMIP5 ensembles, but better simulated in HadAM3P with the exception of being too weak over Western Europe. In all cases, the CMIP5 and AMIP5 performances were almost identical, suggesting that the biases in atmospheric modes considered here are not strongly coupled to SSTs, and perhaps other model characteristics such as resolution are more important. For event attribution studies, it is recommended that rather than taking statistics over the entire CMIP5 or AMIP5 available models, only models capable of producing the relevant dynamical phenomena be employed. ISSN:0930-7575 ISSN:1432-0894

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has accepted the invitation from the UNFCCC to provide a special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways. Many current experiments in, for example, the Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project (CMIP), are not specifically designed for informing this report. Here, we document the design of the Half a degree Additional warming, Projections, Prognosis and Impacts (HAPPI) experiment. HAPPI provides a framework for the generation of climate data describing how the climate, and in particular extreme weather, might differ from the present day in worlds that are 1.5 °C and 2.0 °C warmer than pre-industrial conditions. Output from participating climate models includes variables frequently used by a range of integrated assessment models. The key challenge is to separate the impact of an additional approximately half degree of warming from uncertainty in climate model responses and internal climate variability that dominate CMIP-style experiments. Large ensembles of simulations (> 50 members) of atmosphere-only models for three time slice experiments are proposed, each a decade in length; the first being the most recent observed 10-year period (2006–2015), the second two being estimates of the a similar decade but under 1.5 and 2 °C conditions a century in the future. We use the Representative Concentration Pathways 2.6 (RCP2.6) to provide the model boundary conditions for the 1.5 °C scenario, and a weighted combination of RCP2.6 and RCP4.5 for the 2 °C scenario.

Changes in near surface air temperature (ΔT) in response to anthropogenic greenhouse gas forcing are expected to show spatial heterogeneity because energy and moisture fluxes are modulated by features of the landscape that are also heterogeneous at these spatial scales. Detecting statistically meaningful heterogeneity requires a combination of high spatial resolution and a large number of simulations. To investigate spatial variability of projected ΔT, we generated regional, high-resolution (25-km horizontal), large ensemble (100 members per year), climate simulations of western United States (US) for the periods 1985 – 2014 and 2030 – 2059, the latter with atmospheric constituent concentrations from the Representative Concentration Pathway 4.5. Using the large ensemble, 95% confidence interval sizes for grid-cell-scale temperature responses were on the order of 0.1 °C, compared to 1 °C from a single ensemble member only. In both winter and spring, the snow-albedo feedback statistically explains roughly half of the spatial variability in 'T. Simulated decreases in albedo exceed 0.1 in places, with rates of change in T per 0.1 decrease in albedo ranging from 0.3 to 1.4 °C. In summer, ΔT pattern in the northwest US is correlated with the pattern of decreasing precipitation. In all seasons, changing lapse rates in the low-to-middle troposphere may account for up to 0.2 °C differences in warming across the western US. Near the coast, a major control of spatial variation is the differential warming between sea and land.

A new climate modelling project has been developed for regional climate simulation and the attribution of weather and climate extremes over Australia and New Zealand. The project, known as weather@home Australia-New Zealand, uses public volunteers' home computers to run a moderate-resolution global atmospheric model with a nested regional model over the Australasian region. By harnessing the aggregated computing power of home computers, weather@home is able to generate an unprecedented number of simulations of possible weather under various climate scenarios. This combination of large ensemble sizes with high spatial resolution allows extreme events to be examined with more robust estimates of uncertainty. This paper provides an overview of the weather@home Australia-New Zealand project, including initial evaluation of the regional model performance. The model is seen to be capable of resolving many climate features that are important for the Australian and New Zealand regions, including the influence of El Niño-Southern Oscillation on driving natural climate variability. To date, 75 model simulations of the observed climate have been successfully integrated over the period 1985–2014 in a time-slice manner. In addition, multi-thousand member ensembles have also been generated for the years 2013, 2014 and 2015 under climate scenarios with and without the effect of human influences. All data generated by the project is freely available to the broader research community.

A succession of storms reaching Southern England in the winter of 2013/2014 caused severe floods and £451 million insured losses. In a large ensemble of climate model simulations, we find that, as well as increasing the amount of moisture the atmosphere can hold, anthropogenic warming caused a small but significant increase in the number of January days with westerly flow, both of which increased extreme precipitation. Hydrological modelling indicates this increased extreme 30-day-average Thames river flows, and slightly increased daily peak flows, consistent with the understanding of the catchment’s sensitivity to longer-duration precipitation and changes in the role of snowmelt. Consequently, flood risk mapping shows a small increase in properties in the Thames catchment potentially at risk of riverine flooding, with a substantial range of uncertainty, demonstrating the importance of explicit modelling of impacts and relatively subtle changes in weather-related risks when quantifying present-day effects of human influence on climate.

Geoscientific Model Development, 10 (5), ISSN:1991-9603, ISSN:1991-959X