Spatial Patterns of Global Precipitation Change and Variability during 1901–2010

Abstract

This study examines global precipitation changes/variations during 1901–2010 by using the long-record GPCC land precipitation analysis, the NOAA/Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites (CICS) reconstructed (RECONS) precipitation analysis, and the CMIP5 outputs. In particular, spatial features of long-term precipitation changes and trends and decadal/interdecadal precipitation variations are explored by focusing on the effects of various physical mechanisms such as the anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) and aerosol forcings and certain internal oscillations including the Pacific decadal variability (PDV) and Atlantic multidecadal oscillation (AMO). Precipitation increases in the Northern Hemisphere (NH) mid- to high-latitude lands observed in GPCC can also be found in RECONS and model simulations. Over tropical/subtropical land areas, precipitation reductions generally appear in all products, but with large discrepancies on regional scales. Over ocean, consistent spatial structures of precipitation change also exist between RECONS and models. It is further found that these long-term changes/trends might be due to both anthropogenic GHG and aerosols. The aerosol effect estimated from CMIP5 historical simulations is then removed from the GPCC, RECONS, and AMIP simulations. These isolated GHG-related changes/trends have many similar spatial features when compared to the CMIP5 GHG-only simulations, especially in the zonal-mean context. Both PDV and AMO have influence on spatial patterns of precipitation variations during the past century. In the NH middle to high latitudes, PDV and AMO have played an important role on interdecadal/multidecadal time scales. In several tropical/subtropical regions, their impacts may even become dominant for certain time spans including the recent past two decades. Therefore, these two internal mechanisms make the estimations of GHG and aerosol effects on precipitation on decadal/interdecadal time scales very challenging, especially on regional scales.

SPATIO‐TEMPORAL VARIATIONS OF SEVEN WEATHER VARIABLES IN IRAN: APPLICATION OF CRU TS AND GPCC DATA SETS†

“…However, spatial distribution of temporal trends in the current study is more or less identical to the pattern resulting from the NASA GISS Climate Model E which detected significant decreasing trends in the south, south-west, north-west and north-east. Stronger trends detected in the current study (mostly between À3.1 and À 9.3 mm yr À1 ) are the result of using a more recent period (1987-2016) compared with 1979-2012 in Gu and Adler (2015) and 1951in Raziei et al (2014.…”

“…Iran is among those countries that have experienced the strongest linear trends in surface temperature during 1979-2012(Gu and Adler, 2015. Based on GISS global surface temperature anomalies, all over the country, except the south-east corner, revealed increasing trends in surface temperature of magnitudes >0.04°C yr À1 over the period 1979-2012.…”

Variations and changes of annual precipitation in Central Asia over the last century

“…For 1901–2013, a weak increasing linear trend [0.66 mm (10 years) −1 ] of the annual precipitation over Central Asia is consistent with the increase in the Northern Hemisphere mid‐ to high‐latitude lands by GPCC V6 and model simulations (Gu and Adler, ), and in global land (New et al ., ). The significant negative correlation (CC = −0.27) between Central Asia and global land can be explained by the opposite interdecadal variations compared with the global land precipitation (Nickl et al ., ).…”

“…Based on the long‐term precipitation data sets, previous studies revealed that the global land area has experienced an overall increasing trend in precipitation during the past century (Diaz et al ., ; Vinnikov et al ., ; Dai et al ., ; Hartmann et al ., ; Gu and Adler, ). However, precipitation changes show strong regional differences during the past century (Dai et al ., ; Wang et al ., ; Trenberth et al ., ).…”

Contributions of Internal Variability and External Forcing to the Recent Pacific Decadal Variations

“…The Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO; Power et al, ), or its North Pacific counterpart—the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (Mantua et al, ), is the leading mode of sea surface temperature (SST) variability on decadal to multidecadal time scales in the Pacific basin that broadly resembles El Niño‐Southern Oscillation (ENSO)‐related SST anomaly patterns (Zhang et al, ). The IPO impacts surface temperature and precipitation over many parts of the world (e.g., Dai, ; Dong & Dai, ; Gu & Adler, ) and causes decadal changes in global warming rates (Fyfe et al, ). In particular, the cooling in the eastern Pacific since around 1993 associated with the IPO phase changes is likely a major cause for the recent slowdown in the global surface warming rate since the late 1990s (Dai et al, ; Kosaka & Xie, ).…”