Intensification of precipitation extremes with warming in a cloud resolving model

Abstract

A cloud-resolving model is used to investigate the effect of warming on high percentiles of precipitation (precipitation extremes) in the idealized setting of radiative-convective equilibrium. While this idealized setting does not allow for several factors that influence precipitation in the tropics, it does allow for an evaluation of the response of precipitation extremes to warming in simulations with resolved rather than parameterized convection. The methodology developed should also be applicable to less idealized simulations.

Modeled precipitation extremes are found to increase in magnitude in response to an increase in sea surface temperature. A dry static energy budget is used to relate the changes in precipitation extremes to changes in atmospheric temperature, vertical velocity, and precipitation efficiency. To first order, the changes in precipitation extremes are captured by changes in the mean temperature structure of the atmosphere. Changes in vertical velocities play a secondary role and tend to weaken the strength of precipitation extremes, despite an intensification of updraft velocities in the upper troposphere. The influence of changes in condensate transports on precipitation extremes is quantified in terms of a precipitation efficiency; it does not change greatly with warming.

Tropical precipitation extremes have previously been found to increase at a greater fractional rate than the amount of atmospheric water vapor in observations of present-day variability and in some climate model simulations with parameterized convection. But the fractional increases in precipitation extremes in the cloud-resolving simulations are comparable in magnitude to those in surface water vapor concentrations (owing to a partial cancellation between dynamical and thermodynamical changes), and are substantially less than the fractional increases in column water vapor.