Abstract
Purpose of ReviewAtmospheric circulation exerts a strong control on regional climate and extremes. However, projections of future circulation change remain uncertain, thus affecting the assessment of regional climate change. The purpose of this review is to describe some key cases where regional precipitation and windiness strongly depend on the mid-latitude atmospheric circulation response to warming, and summarise this into alternative plausible storylines of regional climate change.Recent FindingsRecent research has enabled to better quantify the importance of dynamical aspects of climate change in shaping regional climate. The cold season precipitation response in Mediterranean-like regions is identified as one of the most susceptible impact-relevant aspects of regional climate driven by mid-latitude circulation changes. A circulation-forced drying might already be emerging in the actual Mediterranean, Chile and southwestern Australia. Increasing evidence indicates that distinct regional changes in atmospheric circulation and European windiness might unfold depending on the interplay of different climate drivers, such as surface warming patterns, sea ice loss and stratospheric changes.SummaryThe multi-model mean circulation response to warming tends to show washed-out signals due to the lack of robustness in the model projections, with implications for regional changes. To better communicate the information contained within these projections, it is useful to discuss regional climate change conditionally on alternative plausible storylines of atmospheric circulation change. As progress continues in understanding the factors driving the response of circulation to global warming, developing such storylines will provide end–to–end and physically self-consistent descriptions of plausible future unfoldings of regional climate change.
Highlights
In the last decade, consensus has started to grow on how atmospheric circulation will respond to global warming [1]
Several aspects of regional climate depend on the response of mid-latitude atmospheric circulation to climate change
While the internal variability in the atmospheric circulation is a leading uncertainty in extratropical regional climate change [141], these examples have served to highlight cases where the uncertainty in the forced circulation response is sufficiently large that the magnitude, and sometimes even the direction, of these regional climate trends cannot yet be anticipated, even for a specified level of global warming (Figs. 1 and 2)
Summary
Consensus has started to grow on how atmospheric circulation will respond to global warming [1]. Changes consistent with the models’ projections are starting to be observed in the real world, but due to the large year-to-year internal variability in the climate system, not even the observed trends in the zonalmean aspects of atmospheric circulation have yet been unequivocally attributed to warming [6]. If greenhouse gas emissions are not mitigated and climate model projections are realised, future changes in the atmospheric circulation will not pass unobserved. In the mid-latitudes, atmospheric circulation determines the trajectory of weather systems and their associated precipitation and wind speed extremes [7]; it stirs the transport of moisture from dry to wet regions [8]; it drives hot extremes in summer and cold extremes in winter through the establishment of persistent. Atmospheric circulation change can have a diverse range of societal impacts
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