Search

The impact of North American and European (NAEU) anthropogenic aerosol emissions on Eurasian summer climate during the twentieth century is studied using historical single- and all-forcing (including anthropogenic aerosols, greenhouse gases, and natural forcings) simulations from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5). Inter-model agreement on significant linear trends during a period of increasing NAEU sulphate emissions (1900-1974) reveals robust features of NAEU aerosol impact, supported by opposite changes during the subsequent period of decreasing emissions. Regionally, these include a large-scale cooling and associated anticyclonic circulation as well as a narrowing of diurnal temperature range (DTR) over Eurasian mid-latitudes. Remotely, NAEU aerosols induce a drying over the western African and northern Indian monsoon regions, and a strengthening and southward shift of the sub-tropical jet consistent with the pattern of temperature change. Over Europe, the temporal variations of observed temperature, pressure, and DTR tend to agree better with simulations that include aerosols. Throughout the twentieth century, aerosols are estimated to explain more than a third of the simulated inter-decadal forced variability of European near-surface temperature, and more than half between 1940 and 1970. These results highlight the substantial aerosol impact on Eurasian climate, already identifiable in the first half of the twentieth century. This may be relevant for understanding future patterns of change related to further emission reductions.

The wet-gets-wetter, dry-gets-drier paradigm (WWDD) is widely used to summarize the expected response of the hydrological cycle to global warming. While some studies find that changes in observations and climate models support the WWDD paradigm, others find that it is more complicated at local scales and over land. This discrepancy is partly explained by differences in model climatologies and by movement of the wet and dry regions. Here we show that by tracking changes in wet and dry regions as they shift over the tropics and vary in models, mean precipitation changes follow the WWDD pattern in observations and models over land and ocean. However, this signal is reduced and disappears in model dry regions, when these factors are not accounted for. Accounting for seasonal and interannual shifts of the regions and climatological differences between models reduces uncertainty in predictions of future precipitation changes and makes these changes detectable earlier.

The spatial context is critical when assessing present-day climate anomalies, attributing them to potential forcings and making statements regarding their frequency and severity in a long-term perspective. Recent international initiatives have expanded the number of high-quality proxy-records and developed new statistical reconstruction methods. These advances allow more rigorous regional past temperature reconstructions and, in turn, the possibility of evaluating climate models on policy-relevant, spatio-temporal scales. Here we provide a new proxy-based, annually-resolved, spatial reconstruction of the European summer (June–August) temperature fields back to 755 CE based on Bayesian hierarchical modelling (BHM), together with estimates of the European mean temperature variation since 138 BCE based on BHM and composite-plus-scaling (CPS). Our reconstructions compare well with independent instrumental and proxy-based temperature estimates, but suggest a larger amplitude in summer temperature variability than previously reported. Both CPS and BHM reconstructions indicate that the mean 20th century European summer temperature was not significantly different from some earlier centuries, including the 1st, 2nd, 8th and 10th centuries CE. The 1st century (in BHM also the 10th century) may even have been slightly warmer than the 20th century, but the difference is not statistically significant. Comparing each 50 yr period with the 1951–2000 period reveals a similar pattern. Recent summers, however, have been unusually warm in the context of the last two millennia and there are no 30 yr periods in either reconstruction that exceed the mean average European summer temperature of the last 3 decades (1986–2015 CE). A comparison with an ensemble of climate model simulations suggests that the reconstructed European summer temperature variability over the period 850–2000 CE reflects changes in both internal variability and external forcing on multi-decadal time-scales. For pan-European temperatures we find slightly better agreement between the reconstruction and the model simulations with high-end estimates for total solar irradiance. Temperature differences between the medieval period, the recent period and the Little Ice Age are larger in the reconstructions than the simulations. This may indicate inflated variability of the reconstructions, a lack of sensitivity and processes to changes in external forcing on the simulated European climate and/or an underestimation of internal variability on centennial and longer time scales., Support for PAGES 2k activities is provided by the US and Swiss National Science Foundations, US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme. JPWacknowledges support from the Centre of Climate Dynamics (SKD), Bergen. The work of OB, SW and EZ is part of CLISAP. JL, SW, EZ, JPW, JGN, OB also acknowledge support by the German Science Foundation Project ‘Precipitation in the past millennia in Europe–Extensionback toRoman times’.MBacknowledges the Catalan Meteorological Survey (SMC), National Programme I+D, Project CGL2011-28255. PD and RB acknowledge support from the Czech Science Foundation project no. GA13-04291S. VK was supported by Russian Science Foundation (grant 14- 19-00765) and the Russian Foundation for Humanities (grants 15-07-00012, 15-37-11129). GH and AS are supported by the ERC funded project TITAN (EC- 320691). GH was further funded by the Wolfson Foundation and the Royal Society as a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award (WM130060) holder. NY is funded by the LOEWEexcellence cluster FACE2- FACE of the Hessen State Ministry of Higher Education, Research and the Arts; HZ acknowledge support from the DFG project AFICHE. Lamont contribution #7961. The reconstructions can be downloaded from the NOAA paleoclimate homepage: www.ncdc.noaa. gov/paleo/study/19600. LFD, EGB and JFGR were supported by grants CGL2011-29677-c02-02 and CGL2014-599644-R. All authors are part of the Euro- Med 2kConsortium.

International audience; Estimated external radiative forcings, model results, and proxy-based climate reconstructions have been used over the past several decades to improve our understanding of the mechanisms underlying observed climate variability and change over the past millennium. Here, the recent set of temperature reconstructions at the continentalscale generated by the PAGES 2k project and a collection of state-of-the-art model simulations driven by realistic external forcings are jointly analysed. The first aim is to estimate the consistency between model results and reconstructions for each continental-scale region over the time and frequency domains. Secondly, the links between regions are investigated to determine whether reconstructed global-scale covariability patterns are similar to those identified in model simulations. The third aim is to assess the role of external forcings in the observed temperature variations. From a large set of analyses, we conclude that models are in relatively good agreement with temperature reconstructions for Northern Hemisphere regions, particularly in the Arctic. This is likely due to the relatively large amplitude of the externally forced response across northern and high-latitude regions, which results in a clearly detectable signature in both reconstructions and simulations. Conversely, models disagree strongly with the reconstructions in the Southern Hemisphere. Furthermore, the simulations are more regionally coherent than the reconstructions, perhaps due to an underestimation of the magnitude of internal variability in models or to an overestimation of the response to the external forcing in the Southern Hemisphere. Part of the disagreement might also reflect large uncertainties in the reconstructions, specifically in some Southern Hemisphere regions, which are based on fewer palaeoclimate records than in the Northern Hemisphere.

To assess gaps in understanding of Earth’s climate sensitivities a workshop was organised under the auspices of the WCRP Grand Science Challenge on Clouds, Circulation and Climate Sensitivity (Ringberg15). The workshop took place in March 2015 and gathered together over thirty experts from around the world for one week. Attendees each gave short presentations and participated in moderated discussions of specific questions related to understanding Earth’s climate sensitivities. Most of the time was focused on understanding of the equilibrium climate sensitivity, defined as the equilibrium near-surface warming associated with a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide. The workshop produced nine recommendations, many of them focusing on specific research avenues that could be exploited to advance understanding of climate sensitivity. Many of these dealt, in one fashion or another, with the need to more sharply focus research on identifying and testing story lines for a high (larger than 4K) or low (less than 2 K) equilibrium climate sensitivity. Additionally, a subset of model intercomparison projects (CFMIP, PMIP, PDRMIP, RFMIP and VolMIP) that have been proposed for inclusion within CMIP were identified as being central to resolving important issues raised at the workshop; for this reason modelling groups were strongly encouraged to participate in these projects. Finally the workshop participants encouraged the WCRP to initiate and support an assessment process lead by the Grand Science Challenge on Clouds, Circulation and Climate Sensitivity on the topic of Earth’s Climate Sensitivities, culminating in a report that will be published in 2019, forty years after the seminal report by Charney and co-authors.

Estimated external radiative forcings, model results, and proxy-based climate reconstructions have been used over the past several decades to improve our understanding of the mechanisms underlying observed climate variability and change over the past millennium. Here, the recent set of temperature reconstructions at the continental-scale generated by the PAGES 2k project and a collection of state-of-the-art model simulations driven by realistic external forcings are jointly analysed. The first aim is to estimate the consistency between model results and reconstructions for each continental-scale region over the time and frequency domains. Secondly, the links between regions are investigated to determine whether reconstructed global-scale covariability patterns are similar to those identified in model simulations. The third aim is to assess the role of external forcings in the observed temperature variations. From a large set of analyses, we conclude that models are in relatively good agreement with temperature reconstructions for Northern Hemisphere regions, particularly in the Arctic. This is likely due to the relatively large amplitude of the externally forced response across northern and high-latitude regions, which results in a clearly detectable signature in both reconstructions and simulations. Conversely, models disagree strongly with the reconstructions in the Southern Hemisphere. Furthermore, the simulations are more regionally coherent than the reconstructions, perhaps due to an underestimation of the magnitude of internal variability in models or to an overestimation of the response to the external forcing in the Southern Hemisphere. Part of the disagreement might also reflect large uncertainties in the reconstructions, specifically in some Southern Hemisphere regions, which are based on fewer palaeoclimate records than in the Northern Hemisphere. © Author(s) 2015.

The Northern Hemisphere monsoons are an integral component of Earth's hydrological cycle and affect the lives of billions of people. Observed precipitation in the monsoon regions underwent substantial changes during the second half of the 20th century, with drying from the 1950s to mid-1980s and increasing precipitation in recent decades. Modeling studies suggest anthropogenic aerosols has been a key factor driving changes in tropical and monsoon precipitation. Here we apply detection and attribution methods to determine whether observed changes are driven \ud by human influences using fingerprints of individual forcings (i.e. greenhouse gas, anthropogenic aerosol and natural) derived from climate models. The results show that the observed changes can only be explained when including the influence of anthropogenic aerosols, even after accounting for internal climate variability. Anthropogenic aerosol, not greenhouse gas or natural forcing, has been the dominant influence on Northern Hemisphere monsoon precipitation over the second half of the 20th century.

We analyze observed mean to extreme summer temperature indices across Europe in order to determine whether there is evidence for a detectable climate change signal and whether these indices show evidence for predictability. Observations from 1960 to 2011, taken from E-OBS an observational dataset created for the European Commission funded project (ENSEMBLES), are compared with the model simulations from the global coupled climate models CanCM4, HadCM3, MIROC5, and MPI-ESM-LR, as published on the CMIP5 archive. Indices are examined that span a moderate to extreme range of the summer temperature distribution by including the summer average, the hottest 5day average, and the hottest daily maximum and daily minimum temperatures during summer. The region of interest is Europe; however, a number of subregions are also studied, which include Western Europe, the British Isles, the Mediterranean, and Central Europe. The observed changes in the analyzed indices are well represented by the multimodel mean and are within the range of the multimodel ensemble for most regions, with the exception of 1 and 5day average daily maximum temperature extremes across the UK. Observed changes are detectable against estimates of internal climate variability for both moderate and extreme temperature indices across all regions in almost all cases. Exceptions are the hottest 5day average daily maximum temperature in the UK and Central Europe, for which results are not conclusive. An analysis of the skill in decadal hindcasts of these indices shows that there is significant prediction skill across these indices for three of the four models for some regions and some models. This skill exceeds the skill of forecasts based on observed climatology and random noise and is largely due to external forcing. However, there is some evidence that there is additional skill originating from the assimilation of observations into the initialization in some cases.

While changes in land precipitation during the last 50 years have been attributed in part to human influences, results vary by season, are affected by data uncertainty and do not account for changes over ocean. One of the more physically robust responses of the water cycle to warming is the expected amplification of existing patterns of precipitation minus evaporation. Here, precipitation changes in wet and dry regions are analyzed from satellite data for 1988-2010, covering land and ocean. We derive fingerprints for the expected change from climate model simulations that separately track changes in wet and dry regions. The simulations used are driven with anthropogenic and natural forcings combined, and greenhouse gas forcing or natural forcing only. Results of detection and attribution analysis show that the fingerprint of combined external forcing is detectable in observations and that this intensification of the water cycle is partly attributable to greenhouse gas forcing.

International audience; Understanding and Attributing Climate Change Chapter 9