Causes of future Mediterranean precipitation decline depend on the season

Abstract

Future mean precipitation in the Mediterranean is projected to decrease year-round in response to global warming, threatening to aggravate water stress in the region, which can cause social and economic difficulties. We investigate possible causes of the Mediterranean drying in regional climate simulations. To test the influence of multiple large-scale drivers on the drying, we sequentially add them to the simulations. We find that the causes of the Mediterranean drying depend on the season. The summer drying results from the land-ocean warming contrast, and from lapse-rate and other thermodynamic changes, but only weakly depends on circulation changes. In contrast, to reproduce the simulated Mediterranean winter drying, additional changes in the circulation and atmospheric state have to be represented in the simulations. Since land-ocean contrast, thermodynamic and lapse-rate changes are more robust in climate simulations than circulation changes, the uncertainty associated with the projected drying should be considered smaller in summer than in winter.