On the Discrepancies in Tropical Belt Expansion between Reanalyses and Climate Models and among Tropical Belt Width Metrics

Abstract

Abstract The arid subtropics are situated at the edges of the tropical belt, where subsidence in the Hadley cells suppresses precipitation. Any meridional shift in these edge latitudes could have significant impacts on surface climate. Recent studies have investigated past and future changes in the tropical belt width and have found discrepancies in the rates of expansion estimated with different metrics and between climate models and reanalyses. Here, CMIP5 simulations and four modern reanalyses are analyzed using an ensemble of objective tropical belt width metrics to reexamine if such inconsistencies exist. The authors do not find sufficient evidence to demonstrate this discrepancy between models and reanalyses, as reanalysis trends in the tropical belt width fall within the range of model trends for any given metric. Furthermore, only metrics based on the Hadley cells are found to exhibit robust historical and future expansion. Metrics based on the subtropical jet and the tropopause show no robust response. This differentiation may be due to the strong correlation, on all time scales, between the Hadley cell edge latitudes and the latitudes of the eddy-driven jets, which consistently shift poleward in response to radiative forcings. In contrast, the subtropical jet and tropopause metrics appear to be decoupled from the Hadley cells and the eddy-driven jets and essentially measure a different tropical belt. The tropical belt width metrics are inconsistently correlated with surface climate indices based on precipitation and surface evaporation. This may make assessing the surface impacts of observed and future tropical expansion challenging.