Abstract
AbstractHeavy precipitation is often the trigger for flooding and landslides, leading to significant societal and economic impacts, ranging from fatalities to damage to infrastructure to loss of crops and livestock. Therefore, it is critical that we have a better understanding of how it may be changing in the future. Based on model projections from phases 3 and 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP3 and CMIP5), future daily precipitation is likely to increase in intensity. The main goal of this study is to examine possible improvements in the representation of intense and extreme precipitation by a new set of climate models contributing to phase 6 of CMIP effort (CMIP6) and to quantify its projected changes under the highest emissions scenario by the end of the current century [i.e., Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) SSP5-8.5]. Daily precipitation data from six CMIP6 models were analyzed that have a nominal horizontal grid spacing around 100 km and provide data for the highest emissions scenario SSP5-8.5. Two of the six CMIP6 models overestimate the extreme precipitation (defined as the 99th percentile of the precipitation distribution) in the tropics, leading to large biases in the right tail of the daily precipitation over the tropics. Consistent with the CMIP5 results, the CMIP6 models projected increased heavy daily precipitation and increased width of the right tail of the precipitation distribution associated with increased water vapor content.
Highlights
Changes in intense precipitation events are one major concern of climate change
In the analyzed CMIP6 ensemble, the 90p simulated at mid- and high latitudes is in agreement with observations, but there is a bias of up to 20 mm day21 over a significant fraction of the tropical domain, with model-dependent spatial patterns and signs
The 99p model biases are shown in Fig. 2 for the DJF season, when a common model tendency to underestimate extreme precipitation is found over the whole Northern Hemisphere and a common model tendency to overestimate extreme precipitation is found over the whole Southern Hemisphere
Summary
Changes in intense precipitation events are one major concern of climate change. Future climate projections from phases 3 and 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project [CMIP3 (Meehl et al 2007) and CMIP5 (Meehl and Bony 2012; Taylor et al 2012)] projects allowed the investigation of precipitation and other changes under different twenty-firstcentury emissions scenarios. Seager et al 2012; Scoccimarro et al 2013, 2016; Dai et al 2020; Katiraie-Boroujerdy et al 2019) These studies found that climate models represent the presentday heavy precipitation in the extratropics reasonably well, but there are large biases in simulating heavy precipitation in the tropics (e.g., Kharin et al 2007; O’Gorman and Schneider 2009; Scoccimarro et al 2013). They showed that future heavy precipitation is generally expected to increase more than the mean precipitation but the large intermodel disagreement in the tropics reduces our confidence on the projections over such domain. Our earlier work (Scoccimarro et al 2013, hereinafter SCOC13) based on CMIP5 projections demonstrates that the width of the right tail of the precipitation event distribution increases almost everywhere, independently of the direction in which the distribution evolves in a warmer climate; the regions affected by strong stretching of the right tail of the precipitation event distribution in the future correspond to strong increased availability of water vapor content in the atmospheric column
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