PCIC science brief: The human influence on North American and Eurasian precipitation
Date
2019-11
Authors
Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium (PCIC)
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium (PCIC)
Abstract
Understanding how human influences are affecting different parts of the climate system allows us to improve future climate projections. Due to the relative sparsity of precipitation data and the large amount of internal variability that it exhibits, detecting and attributing the human influence on precipitation is difficult. This Science Brief covers recent research that uses information about the physical processes responsible for precipitation in order to detect the anthropogenic influence on winter precipitation over North America and Eurasia over the 1920-2015 period.
Publishing in Geophysical Research Letters, Guo et al. (2019) use a technique known as "dynamical adjustment," to estimate the atmospheric circulation and thermodynamic contributions to observed precipitation over Eastern North America and Northern Eurasia over the 1920-2015 period. They find that the thermodynamic component, due to anthropogenic emissions, contributes to increases in precipitation in both regions. They then compare the spatial pattern and magnitude of these components to those obtained from global climate models driven with anthropogenic forcings. They find strong agreement between the thermodynamic components of precipitation obtained from the observational data and those obtained from climate model output.
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Keywords
UN SDG 13: Climate Action, #science brief, #PCIC publication