Projected Changes in Temperature and Precipitation Over the United States, Central America, and the Caribbean in CMIP6 GCMs

Almazroui, Mansour; Islam, Md. Nazrul; Saeed, Fahad; Saeed, Sajjad; Ismail, Muhammad; Ehsan, Muhammad Fahad; Diallo, Ismaïla; O’Brien, Enda; Ashfaq, Moetasim; Martinez‐Castro, Daniel; Cavazos, Tereza; Cerezo‐Mota, Ruth; Tippett, Michael K.; Gutowski, William J.; Alfaro, Eric J.; Hidalgo, H. G.; Vichot‐Llano, Alejandro; Campbell, Jayaka D.; Kamil, Shahzad; Rashid, Irfan Ur; Sylla, Mouhamadou Bamba; Stephenson, Tannecia S.; Taylor, Michael A.; Barlow, Mathew

doi:10.1007/s41748-021-00199-5

Cited by 157 publications

(117 citation statements)

References 113 publications

(71 reference statements)

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“…12f). This temperature response is in contrast to that seen over North America where higher latitudes tend to exhibit the strongest warming signal (Almazroui et al 2021). These contrasting latitudinal variations in temperature response over North and South America can be partly explained in terms of their differences in the characteristics of precipitation type.…”

Section: Spatiotemporal Distribution Of Projected Changes In Temperature and Precipitationmentioning

confidence: 57%

Assessment of CMIP6 Performance and Projected Temperature and Precipitation Changes Over South America

et al. 2021

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We evaluate the performance of a large ensemble of Global Climate Models (GCMs) from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) over South America for a recent past reference period and examine their projections of twenty-first century precipitation and temperature changes. The future changes are computed for two time slices (2040–2059 and 2080–2099) relative to the reference period (1995–2014) under four Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs, SSP1–2.6, SSP2–4.5, SSP3–7.0 and SSP5–8.5). The CMIP6 GCMs successfully capture the main climate characteristics across South America. However, they exhibit varying skill in the spatiotemporal distribution of precipitation and temperature at the sub-regional scale, particularly over high latitudes and altitudes. Future precipitation exhibits a decrease over the east of the northern Andes in tropical South America and the southern Andes in Chile and Amazonia, and an increase over southeastern South America and the northern Andes—a result generally consistent with earlier CMIP (3 and 5) projections. However, most of these changes remain within the range of variability of the reference period. In contrast, temperature increases are robust in terms of magnitude even under the SSP1–2.6. Future changes mostly progress monotonically from the weakest to the strongest forcing scenario, and from the mid-century to late-century projection period. There is an increase in the seasonality of the intra-annual precipitation distribution, as the wetter part of the year contributes relatively more to the annual total. Furthermore, an increasingly heavy-tailed precipitation distribution and a rightward shifted temperature distribution provide strong indications of a more intense hydrological cycle as greenhouse gas emissions increase. The relative distance of an individual GCM from the ensemble mean does not substantially vary across different scenarios. We found no clear systematic linkage between model spread about the mean in the reference period and the magnitude of simulated sub-regional climate change in the future period. Overall, these results could be useful for regional climate change impact assessments across South America.

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Section: Spatiotemporal Distribution Of Projected Changes In Temperature and Precipitationmentioning

confidence: 57%

Assessment of CMIP6 Performance and Projected Temperature and Precipitation Changes Over South America

et al. 2021

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“…To facilitate the comparison between the model and observation, CRU gridded-observation and SRB reanalysis products were bi-linearly interpolated on the RegCM4-CLM45 horizontal grid. This bi-linear interpolation already used in some previous studies (Diallo et al 2013;Li et al 2015;Jia et al 2019;Libanda and Nkolola 2019;Krishnan and Bhaskaran 2020;Anwar and Diallo 2021c, d;Almazroui et al 2021;Dosio et al 2021) has been chosen since it does not impose a significant impact on the spatial distribution of climatology, trends, or biases (Wang et al 2021).…”

Section: Validation Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Influence of Vegetation Cover Changes and Vegetation-Runoff Systems on the Simulated Summer Potential Evapotranspiration of Tropical Africa Using RegCM4

Anwar¹,

Mamadou

Diallo

et al. 2021

Earth Syst Environ

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The community land model version 4.5 provides two ways for treating the vegetation cover changes (a static versus an interactive) and two runoff schemes for tracking the soil moisture changes. In this study, we examined the sensitivity of the simulated boreal summer potential evapotranspiration (PET) to the aforementioned options using a regional climate model. Three different experiments with each one covering 16 years have been performed. The two runoff schemes were designated as SIMTOP (TOP) and variable infiltration capacity (VIC). Both runoff schemes were coupled to the carbon–nitrogen (CN) module, thus the vegetation status can be influenced by soil moisture changes. Results show that vegetation cover changes alone affect considerably the simulated 2-m mean air temperature (T2M). However, they do not affect the global incident solar radiation (RSDS) and PET. Conversely to the vegetation cover changes alone, the vegetation-runoff systems affect both the T2M and RSDS. Therefore, they considerably affect the simulated PET. Also, the CN-VIC overestimates the PET more than the CN-TOP compared to the Climatic Research Unit observational dataset. In comparison with the static vegetation case and CN-VIC, the CN-TOP shows the least bias of the simulated PET. Overall, our results show that the vegetation-runoff system is relevant in constraining the PET, though the CN-TOP can be recommended for future studies concerning the PET of tropical Africa.

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“…Summer precipitation over Central America shows a marked decadal variability resulting from modes of large scale variability like El Niño-Southern Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, and the North Atlantic Oscillation (Giannini et al 2000(Giannini et al , 2001Wang 2007;Hastenrath and Polzin 2013;Muñoz-Jimènez et al 2019;Anderson et al 2019;Hidalgo et al 2019). Climate projections from global and regional models consistently suggest a reduction of summertime precipitation between May and September in Central America by the end of this century, along with higher summer temperatures (Giorgi 2006;Rauscher et al 2008;Fuentes-Franco et al 2015;Hidalgo et al 2013;Almazroui et al 2021;Depsky and Pons 2020). This raises the question of whether Anthropogenic Climate Change (ACC) has contributed to the 2015-2019 meteorological drought and to the 40-year negative trend, increasing their likelihood.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Natural variability vs forced signal in the 2015–2019 Central American drought

et al. 2021

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The recent multi-year 2015–2019 drought after a multi-decadal drying trend over Central America raises the question of whether anthropogenic climate change (ACC) played a role in exacerbating these events. While the occurrence of the 2015–2019 drought in Central America has been asserted to be associated with ACC, we lack an assessment of natural vs anthropogenic contributions. Here, we use five different large ensembles—including high-resolution ensembles (i.e., 0.5∘ horizontally)—to estimate the contribution of ACC to the probability of occurrence of the 2015–2019 event and the recent multi-decadal trend. The comparison of ensembles forced with natural and natural plus anthropogenic forcing suggests that the recent 40-year trend is likely associated with internal climate variability. However, the 2015–2019 rainfall deficit has been made more likely by ACC. The synthesis of the results from model ensembles supports the notion of a significant increase, by a factor of four, over the last century for the 2015–2019 meteorological drought to occur because of ACC. All the model results further suggest that, under intermediate and high emission scenarios, the likelihood of similar drought events will continue to increase substantially over the next decades.

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Projected Changes in Temperature and Precipitation Over the United States, Central America, and the Caribbean in CMIP6 GCMs

Cited by 157 publications

References 113 publications

Assessment of CMIP6 Performance and Projected Temperature and Precipitation Changes Over South America

Assessment of CMIP6 Performance and Projected Temperature and Precipitation Changes Over South America

On the Influence of Vegetation Cover Changes and Vegetation-Runoff Systems on the Simulated Summer Potential Evapotranspiration of Tropical Africa Using RegCM4

Natural variability vs forced signal in the 2015–2019 Central American drought

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