Investigation of Precipitation Variations over Wet and Dry Areas from Observation and Model

Abstract

Our observational study revealed that the precipitation increased over the wet area and decreased over the dry area during the past two decades. Here, we further investigate whether the current atmospheric models can quantitatively capture the characteristics of precipitation from the observation. The NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) model is used to examine the historic simulation of the precipitation, in which the historic greenhouse gases and aerosols are included in the radiative forcing. The consistency between the historic GISS simulation and the Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP) precipitation suggests that the model can qualitatively capture the temporal trends of precipitation over the wet and dry areas. However, the precipitation trends are weaker in the model than in the observation. The observed trends of precipitation do not appear in the control simulation with the fixed concentrations of greenhouse gases and aerosols, which suggests that the global warming due to anthropogenic forcing can influence the temporal variations of precipitation over the wet and dry areas. Diagnostic studies of other variables from the model further suggest that enhanced rising air can increase the precipitation over the wet area.