A Scaling Approach to Probabilistic Assessment of Regional Climate Change

AbstractA new approach to probabilistic projections of regional climate change is introduced. It builds on the already established quasi-linear relation between global-mean temperature and regional climate change found in atmosphere–ocean general circulation models (AOGCMs). The new approach simultaneously 1) takes correlations between temperature- and precipitation-related uncertainty distributions into account, 2) enables the inclusion of predictors other than global-mean temperature, and 3) checks for the interscenario and interrun variability of the scaling relationships. This study tests the effectiveness of SOx and black carbon emissions and greenhouse gas forcings as additional predictors of precipitation changes. The future precipitation response is found to deviate substantially from the linear relationship with global-mean temperature change in some regions; thereby, the two main limitations of a simple linear scaling approach, namely having to rely on exogenous aerosol experiments (or ignoring ...

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