Response of extreme precipitation to uniform surface warming in quasi-global aquaplanet simulations at high resolution
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ogorman_2021.pdf
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Accepted version
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Author(s)
O'Gorman, Paul Ambrose
Li, Z.
Boos, William R.
Yuval, Janni
Date Issued
March 2021
Journal
Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences
Publisher
The Royal Society
Citation
O’Gorman, P. A. et al. "Response of extreme precipitation to uniform surface warming in quasi-global aquaplanet simulations at high resolution." Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences 379, 2195 (April 2021): dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2019.0543. © 2021 The Author(s)
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Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Projections of precipitation extremes in simulations with global climate models are very uncertain in the tropics, in part because of the use of parameterizations of deep convection and model deficiencies in simulating convective organization. Here, we analyse precipitation extremes in high-resolution simulations that are run without a convective parameterization on a quasi-global aquaplanet. The frequency distributions of precipitation rates and precipitation cluster sizes in the tropics of a control simulation are similar to the observed distributions. In response to climate warming, 3 h precipitation extremes increase at rates of up to [Formula: see text] in the tropics because of a combination of positive thermodynamic and dynamic contributions. The dynamic contribution at different latitudes is connected to the vertical structure of warming using a moist static stability. When the precipitation rates are first averaged to a daily timescale and coarse-grained to a typical global climate-model resolution prior to calculating the precipitation extremes, the response of the precipitation extremes to warming becomes more similar to what was found previously in coarse-resolution aquaplanet studies. However, the simulations studied here do not exhibit the high rates of increase of tropical precipitation extremes found in projections with some global climate models. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'Intensification of short-duration rainfall extremes and implications for flash flood risks'.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2019.0543
