Regional Patterns of Sea Surface Temperature Change: A Source of Uncertainty in Future Projections of Precipitation and Atmospheric Circulation*

AbstractPrecipitation change in response to global warming has profound impacts on environment for life but is highly uncertain. Effects of sea surface temperature (SST) warming on the response of rainfall and atmospheric overturning circulation are investigated using Coupled Model Intercomparison Project simulations. The SST warming is decomposed into a spatially uniform SST increase (SUSI) and deviations from it. The SST pattern effect is found to be important in explaining both the multimodel ensemble mean distribution and intermodel variability of rainfall change over tropical oceans. In the ensemble mean, the annual rainfall change follows a “warmer-get-wetter” pattern, increasing where the SST warming exceeds the tropical mean, and vice versa. Two SST patterns stand out both in the ensemble mean and intermodel variability: an equatorial peak anchoring a local precipitation increase and a meridional dipole mode with increased rainfall and weakened trade winds over the warmer hemisphere. These two mod...

[1]  G. Vecchi,et al.  Global Warming and the Weakening of the Tropical Circulation , 2007 .

[2]  C. Bretherton,et al.  The ENSO Signal in Tropical Tropospheric Temperature , 2002 .

[3]  Syukuro Manabe,et al.  Two Stable Equilibria of a Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Model , 1988 .

[4]  S. Vavrus,et al.  Rethinking Tropical Ocean Response to Global Warming: The Enhanced Equatorial Warming* , 2005 .

[5]  S. Xie,et al.  Mechanisms for Tropical Tropospheric Circulation Change in Response to Global Warming , 2012 .

[6]  J. Neelin,et al.  Mechanisms of global warming impacts on regional Tropical precipitation , 2004 .

[7]  K. Findell,et al.  Simulation of Sahel drought in the 20th and 21st centuries. , 2005, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[8]  M. Merrifield.  A Shift in Western Tropical Pacific Sea Level Trends during the 1990s , 2011 .

[9]  W. Collins,et al.  The Formulation and Atmospheric Simulation of the Community Atmosphere Model Version 3 (CAM3) , 2006 .

[10]  C. Bretherton,et al.  Geographic variability in the export of moist static energy and vertical motion profiles in the tropical Pacific , 2006 .

[11]  A. Sobel,et al.  Projected Future Seasonal Changes in Tropical Summer Climate , 2011 .

[12]  Christopher S. Bretherton,et al.  Modeling Tropical Precipitation in a Single Column , 2000 .

[13]  A. Kitoh,et al.  Trend and interannual variability of Walker, monsoon and Hadley circulations defined by velocity potential in the upper troposphere , 2004 .

[14]  G. Vecchi,et al.  Weakening of tropical Pacific atmospheric circulation due to anthropogenic forcing , 2006, Nature.

[15]  More Arid Climate in Southwestern North America Model Projections of an Imminent Transition to a , 2007 .

[16]  Bin Zhao,et al.  The Role of Oceanic Feedback in the Climate Response to Doubling CO2 , 2012 .

[17]  Johannes Quaas,et al.  Global mean cloud feedbacks in idealized climate change experiments , 2006 .

[18]  Byung-Ju Sohn,et al.  Strengthened tropical circulations in past three decades inferred from water vapor transport , 2010 .

[19]  W. Collins,et al.  The Formulation and Atmospheric Simulation of the Community Atmosphere Model: CAM3 , 2005 .

[20]  C. Deser,et al.  Global warming pattern formation: sea surface temperature and rainfall. , 2010 .

[21]  Prashant D. Sardeshmukh,et al.  Critical influence of the pattern of Tropical Ocean warming on remote climate trends , 2011 .

[22]  G. Vecchi,et al.  Effect of remote sea surface temperature change on tropical cyclone potential intensity , 2007, Nature.

[23]  G. Hegerl,et al.  Detection of human influence on twentieth-century precipitation trends , 2007, Nature.

[24]  C. Chou,et al.  Hemispherical Asymmetry of Tropical Precipitation in ECHAM5/MPI-OM during El Niño and under Global Warming , 2008 .

[25]  R. D. Cess.  Comparison of general circulation models , 2008 .

[26]  S. Xie,et al.  Weakening of the equatorial Atlantic cold tongue over the past six decades , 2011 .

[27]  T. Schneider,et al.  WATER VAPOR AND THE DYNAMICS OF CLIMATE CHANGES , 2009, 0908.4410.

[28]  F. Wentz,et al.  How Much More Rain Will Global Warming Bring? , 2007, Science.

[29]  S. Xie,et al.  A coupled ocean‐atmosphere model of relevance to the ITCZ in the eastern Pacific , 1994 .

[30]  R. Seager,et al.  Model Projections of an Imminent Transition to a More Arid Climate in Southwestern North America , 2007, Science.

[31]  S. Xie,et al.  Changes in the sea surface temperature threshold for tropical convection , 2010 .

[32]  J. Neelin,et al.  Evaluating the “Rich-Get-Richer” Mechanism in Tropical Precipitation Change under Global Warming , 2009 .

[33]  A. Timmermann,et al.  The impact of global warming on the tropical Pacific Ocean and El Niño , 2010 .

[34]  G. Vecchi,et al.  Indian Ocean Dipole Response to Global Warming: Analysis of Ocean–Atmospheric Feedbacks in a Coupled Model* , 2009 .

[35]  Why is there a minimum in projected warming in the tropical North Atlantic Ocean? , 2008 .

[36]  The Hadley and Walker Circulation Changes in Global Warming Conditions Described by Idealized Atmospheric Simulations , 2009 .

[37]  John F. B. Mitchell,et al.  THE WCRP CMIP3 Multimodel Dataset: A New Era in Climate Change Research , 2007 .

[38]  Naomi Naik,et al.  Thermodynamic and Dynamic Mechanisms for Large-Scale Changes in the Hydrological Cycle in Response to Global Warming* , 2010 .

[39]  Asymmetric Responses of Tropical Precipitation during ENSO , 2007 .

[40]  A. Timmermann,et al.  Regional patterns of tropical Indo-Pacific climate change: evidence of the Walker circulation weakening , 2012 .

[41]  B. Soden,et al.  Robust Responses of the Hydrological Cycle to Global Warming , 2006 .

[42]  J. Neelin,et al.  Tropical drought regions in global warming and El Niño teleconnections , 2003 .

[43]  Ming Zhao,et al.  TC-Permitting GCM Simulations of Hurricane Frequency Response to Sea Surface Temperature Anomalies Projected for the Late-Twenty-First Century , 2012 .