Journal article
A multiregion model evaluation and attribution study of historical changes in the area affected by temperature and precipitation extremes
AJ Dittus, DJ Karoly, SC Lewis, LV Alexander, MG Donat
Journal of Climate | AMER METEOROLOGICAL SOC | Published : 2016
Abstract
The skill of eight climate models in simulating the variability and trends in the observed areal extent of daily temperature and precipitation extremes is evaluated across five large-scale regions, using the climate extremes index (CEI) framework. Focusing on Europe, North America, Asia, Australia, and the Northern Hemisphere, results show that overall the models are generally able to simulate the decadal variability and trends of the observed temperature and precipitation components over the period 1951-2005. Climate models are able to reproduce observed increasing trends in the area experiencing warm maximum and minimum temperature extremes, as well as, to a lesser extent, increasing trend..
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Grants
Awarded by U.S. Department of Energy
Funding Acknowledgements
Authors are supported by Australian Research Council Grant CE110001028. AJD also acknowledges support from the David Lachlan Hay Memorial Fund. SCL is also supported by Australian Research Council DECRA DE160100092. MGD was supported by Australian Research Council Grant DE150100456. We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme's Working Group on Coupled Modelling, which is responsible for CMIP, and we thank the climate modeling groups listed in Table 1 of this paper for producing and making available their model output. For CMIP, the U.S. Department of Energy's Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison provides coordinating support and led development of software infrastructure in partnership with the Global Organization for Earth System Science Portals. ECMWF ERA-20C data used in this study have been obtained from the ECMWF Data Server. We thank Dr. Daithi Stone and an anonymous reviewer for their useful comments, which helped improve this manuscript.