scholarly journals Regional Climate Impacts of Future Changes in the Mid–Latitude Atmospheric Circulation: a Storyline View

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 358-371 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giuseppe Zappa
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Atmospheric Circulation ◽  
Regional Climate ◽  
Regional Climate Change ◽  
Cold Season ◽  
Climate Impacts ◽  
Surface Warming ◽  
Circulation Change ◽  
Mean Circulation ◽  
Strong Control

Abstract Purpose of Review Atmospheric circulation exerts a strong control on regional climate and extremes. However, projections of future circulation change remain uncertain, thus affecting the assessment of regional climate change. The purpose of this review is to describe some key cases where regional precipitation and windiness strongly depend on the mid-latitude atmospheric circulation response to warming, and summarise this into alternative plausible storylines of regional climate change. Recent Findings Recent research has enabled to better quantify the importance of dynamical aspects of climate change in shaping regional climate. The cold season precipitation response in Mediterranean-like regions is identified as one of the most susceptible impact-relevant aspects of regional climate driven by mid-latitude circulation changes. A circulation-forced drying might already be emerging in the actual Mediterranean, Chile and southwestern Australia. Increasing evidence indicates that distinct regional changes in atmospheric circulation and European windiness might unfold depending on the interplay of different climate drivers, such as surface warming patterns, sea ice loss and stratospheric changes. Summary The multi-model mean circulation response to warming tends to show washed-out signals due to the lack of robustness in the model projections, with implications for regional changes. To better communicate the information contained within these projections, it is useful to discuss regional climate change conditionally on alternative plausible storylines of atmospheric circulation change. As progress continues in understanding the factors driving the response of circulation to global warming, developing such storylines will provide end–to–end and physically self-consistent descriptions of plausible future unfoldings of regional climate change.

scholarly journals Storyline approach to the construction of regional climate change information

2019 ◽  
Vol 475 (2225) ◽  
pp. 20190013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theodore G. Shepherd
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Atmospheric Circulation ◽  
Regional Climate ◽  
Regional Scale ◽  
Regional Climate Change ◽  
Climate Impacts ◽  
Climate Projections ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Climate Change Information ◽  
The Impact

Climate science seeks to make statements of confidence about what has happened, and what will happen (conditional on scenario). The approach is effective for the global, thermodynamic aspects of climate change, but is ineffective when it comes to aspects of climate change related to atmospheric circulation, which are highly uncertain. Yet, atmospheric circulation strongly mediates climate impacts at the regional scale. In this way, the confidence framework, which focuses on avoiding type 1 errors (false alarms), raises the prospect of committing type 2 errors (missed warnings). This has ethical implications. At the regional scale, however, where information on climate change has to be combined with many other factors affecting vulnerability and exposure—most of which are highly uncertain—the societally relevant question is not ‘What will happen?’ but rather ‘What is the impact of particular actions under an uncertain regional climate change?’ This reframing of the question can cut the Gordian knot of regional climate change information, provided one distinguishes between epistemic and aleatoric uncertainties—something that is generally not done in climate projections. It is argued that the storyline approach to climate change—the identification of physically self-consistent, plausible pathways—has the potential to accomplish precisely this.

Responses of the Tropical Atmospheric Circulation to Climate Change and Connection to the Hydrological Cycle

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 549-580 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jian Ma ◽  
Robin Chadwick ◽  
Kyong-Hwan Seo ◽  
Changming Dong ◽  
Gang Huang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Atmospheric Circulation ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Hydrological Cycle ◽  
Regional Climate ◽  
Climate Projections ◽  
Local Circulation ◽  
Surface Warming ◽  
Circulation Change ◽  
The Tropics

This review describes the climate change–induced responses of the tropical atmospheric circulation and their impacts on the hydrological cycle. We depict the theoretically predicted changes and diagnose physical mechanisms for observational and model-projected trends in large-scale and regional climate. The tropical circulation slows down with moisture and stratification changes, connecting to a poleward expansion of the Hadley cells and a shift of the intertropical convergence zone. Redistributions of regional precipitation consist of thermodynamic and dynamical components, including a strong offset between moisture increase and circulation weakening throughout the tropics. This allows other dynamical processes to dominate local circulation changes, such as a surface warming pattern effect over oceans and multiple mechanisms over land. To improve reliability in climate projections, more fundamental understandings of pattern formation, circulation change, and the balance of various processes redistributing land rainfall are suggested to be important.

scholarly journals Storylines of Atmospheric Circulation Change for European Regional Climate Impact Assessment

2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (16) ◽  
pp. 6561-6577 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giuseppe Zappa ◽  
Theodore G. Shepherd
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Global Warming ◽  
Atmospheric Circulation ◽  
Regional Climate ◽  
Climate Impact ◽  
Climate Impacts ◽  
Cmip5 Models ◽  
Regional Impacts ◽  
Circulation Change ◽  
Atmospheric Circulation Change

There is increasing interest in understanding the regional impacts of different global warming targets. However, several regional climate impacts depend on the atmospheric circulation, whose response to climate change remains substantially uncertain and not interpretable in a probabilistic sense in multimodel ensemble projections. To account for these uncertainties, a novel approach where regional climate change is analyzed as a function of carbon emissions conditional on plausible storylines of atmospheric circulation change is here presented and applied to the CMIP5 models’ future projections. The different storylines are determined based on the response in three remote drivers of regional circulation: the tropical and polar amplification of global warming and changes in stratospheric vortex strength. As an illustration of this approach, it is shown that the severity of the projected wintertime Mediterranean precipitation decline and central European windiness increase strongly depends on the storyline of circulation change. For a given magnitude of global warming, the highest impact storyline for these aspects of European climate is found for a high tropical amplification and a strengthening of the vortex. The difference in the precipitation and wind responses between the storylines is substantial and equivalent to the contribution from several degrees of global warming. Improving the understanding of the remote driver responses is thus needed to better bound the projected regional impacts in the European sector. The value of these storylines to represent the uncertainty in regional climate projections and to inform the selection of CMIP5 models in regional climate impact studies is discussed.

Atmospheric circulation during Holocene lake stands in the Mojave Desert: evidence of regional climate change

Nature ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 341 (6237) ◽  
pp. 44-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yehouda Enzel ◽  
Daniel R. Cayan ◽  
Roger Y. Anderson ◽  
Stephen G. Wells
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Atmospheric Circulation ◽  
Mojave Desert ◽  
Regional Climate ◽  
Regional Climate Change

scholarly journals Incorrect Asian aerosols affecting the attribution and projection of regional climate change in CMIP6 models

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhili Wang ◽  
Lei Lin ◽  
Yangyang Xu ◽  
Huizheng Che ◽  
Xiaoye Zhang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Radiative Forcing ◽  
Impact Analysis ◽  
Climate Model ◽  
Regional Climate ◽  
Eastern China ◽  
Coupled Model ◽  
Regional Climate Change ◽  
Anthropogenic Aerosol ◽  
Wide Range

AbstractAnthropogenic aerosol (AA) forcing has been shown as a critical driver of climate change over Asia since the mid-20th century. Here we show that almost all Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) models fail to capture the observed dipole pattern of aerosol optical depth (AOD) trends over Asia during 2006–2014, last decade of CMIP6 historical simulation, due to an opposite trend over eastern China compared with observations. The incorrect AOD trend over China is attributed to problematic AA emissions adopted by CMIP6. There are obvious differences in simulated regional aerosol radiative forcing and temperature responses over Asia when using two different emissions inventories (one adopted by CMIP6; the other from Peking university, a more trustworthy inventory) to driving a global aerosol-climate model separately. We further show that some widely adopted CMIP6 pathways (after 2015) also significantly underestimate the more recent decline in AA emissions over China. These flaws may bring about errors to the CMIP6-based regional climate attribution over Asia for the last two decades and projection for the next few decades, previously anticipated to inform a wide range of impact analysis.

scholarly journals Regional Climate Change Competitiveness—Modelling Approach

Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (12) ◽  
pp. 3704
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Karman ◽  
Andrzej Miszczuk ◽  
Urszula Bronisz
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Regional Climate ◽  
Regional Climate Change ◽  
Measurement Scale ◽  
Practical Application ◽  
Adaptation To Climate Change ◽  
Regional Competitiveness ◽  
The Face ◽  
Competitiveness Index ◽  
Modelling Approach

The article deals with the competitiveness of regions in the face of climate change. The aim was to present the concept of measuring the Regional Climate Change Competitiveness Index. We used a comparative and logical analysis of the concept of regional competitiveness and heuristic conceptual methods to construct the index and measurement scale. The structure of the index includes six broad sub-indexes: Basic, Natural, Efficiency, Innovation, Sectoral, Social, and 89 indicators. A practical application of the model was presented for the Mazowieckie province in Poland. This allowed the region’s performance in the context of climate change to be presented, and regional weaknesses in the process of adaptation to climate change to be identified. The conclusions of the research confirm the possibility of applying the Regional Climate Change Competitiveness Index in the economic analysis and strategic planning. The presented model constitutes one of the earliest tools for the evaluation of climate change competitiveness at a regional level.

scholarly journals Turn down the heat: regional climate change impacts on development

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (6) ◽  
pp. 1563-1568 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher P. O. Reyer ◽  
Kanta Kumari Rigaud ◽  
Erick Fernandes ◽  
William Hare ◽  
Olivia Serdeczny ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Regional Climate ◽  
Climate Change Impacts ◽  
Regional Climate Change
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