Journal article
Can we constrain CMIP5 rainfall projections in the tropical Pacific based on surface warming patterns?
MR Grose, J Bhend, S Narsey, AS Gupta, JR Brown
Journal of Climate | AMER METEOROLOGICAL SOC | Published : 2014
Abstract
Climate warming has large implications for rainfall patterns, and identifying the most plausible pattern of rainfall change over the next century among various model projections would be valuable for future planning. The spatial pattern of projected sea surface temperature change has a key influence on rainfall changes in the tropical Pacific Ocean. Here it is shown that simple indices of the size of the equatorial peak in the spatial pattern of warming and to a lesser extent the hemispheric asymmetry in warming are useful for classifying the surface temperature change in different models from phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5). Models with a more pronounced equator..
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Funding Acknowledgements
This research was conducted with the support of the Pacific-Australia Climate Change Science and Adaptation Planning Program funded by AusAID in collaboration with the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, and delivered by the Bureau of Meteorology and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). We thank the PCMDI and the World Climate Research Program's Working Group on Coupled Modelling for their roles in making available the CMIP3 and CMIP5 multimodel datasets. Support of this dataset is provided by the Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy. More details on model documentation are available at the PCMDI website (http://www-pcmdi.llnl.gov/). The authors also thank the data processing team at CSIRO for the CMIP5 and observed data access. We also thank Jaci Brown and Robert Colman for comments and suggestions on the development of the paper.