scholarly journals Seasonal Responses of Terrestrial Carbon Cycle to Climate Variations in CMIP5 Models: Evaluation and Projection

2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (16) ◽  
pp. 6481-6503 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yongwen Liu ◽  
Shilong Piao ◽  
Xu Lian ◽  
Philippe Ciais ◽  
W. Kolby Smith

Seventeen Earth system models (ESMs) from phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) were evaluated, focusing on the seasonal sensitivities of net biome production (NBP), net primary production (NPP), and heterotrophic respiration (Rh) to interannual variations in temperature and precipitation during 1982–2005 and their changes over the twenty-first century. Temperature sensitivity of NPP in ESMs was generally consistent across northern high-latitude biomes but significantly more negative for tropical and subtropical biomes relative to satellite-derived estimates. The temperature sensitivity of NBP in both inversion-based and ESM estimates was generally consistent in March–May (MAM) and September–November (SON) for tropical forests, semiarid ecosystems, and boreal forests. By contrast, for inversion-based NBP estimates, temperature sensitivity of NBP was nonsignificant for June–August (JJA) for all biomes except boreal forest; whereas, for ESM NBP estimates, the temperature sensitivity for JJA was significantly negative for all biomes except shrublands and subarctic ecosystems. Both satellite-derived NPP and inversion-based NBP are often decoupled from precipitation, whereas ESM NPP and NBP estimates are generally positively correlated with precipitation, suggesting that ESMs are oversensitive to precipitation. Over the twenty-first century, changes in temperature sensitivities of NPP, Rh, and NBP are consistent across all RCPs but stronger under more intensive scenarios. The temperature sensitivity of NBP was found to decrease in tropics and subtropics and increase in northern high latitudes in MAM due to an increased temperature sensitivity of NPP. Across all biomes, projected temperature sensitivity of NPP decreased in JJA and SON. Projected precipitation sensitivity of NBP did not change across biomes, except over grasslands in MAM.

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 611-630
Author(s):  
Mansour Almazroui ◽  
M. Nazrul Islam ◽  
Sajjad Saeed ◽  
Fahad Saeed ◽  
Muhammad Ismail

AbstractThis paper presents the changes in projected temperature and precipitation over the Arabian Peninsula for the twenty-first century using the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 6 (CMIP6) dataset. The changes are obtained by analyzing the multimodel ensemble from 31 CMIP6 models for the near (2030–2059) and far (2070–2099) future periods, with reference to the base period 1981–2010, under three future Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs). Observations show that the annual temperature is rising at the rate of 0.63 ˚C decade–1 (significant at the 99% confidence level), while annual precipitation is decreasing at the rate of 6.3 mm decade–1 (significant at the 90% confidence level), averaged over Saudi Arabia. For the near (far) future period, the 66% likely ranges of annual-averaged temperature is projected to increase by 1.2–1.9 (1.2–2.1) ˚C, 1.4–2.1 (2.3–3.4) ˚C, and 1.8–2.7 (4.1–5.8) ˚C under SSP1–2.6, SSP2–4.5, and SSP5–8.5, respectively. Higher warming is projected in the summer than in the winter, while the Northern Arabian Peninsula (NAP) is projected to warm more than Southern Arabian Peninsula (SAP), by the end of the twenty-first century. For precipitation, a dipole-like pattern is found, with a robust increase in annual mean precipitation over the SAP, and a decrease over the NAP. The 66% likely ranges of annual-averaged precipitation over the whole Arabian Peninsula is projected to change by 5 to 28 (–3 to 29) %, 5 to 31 (4 to 49) %, and 1 to 38 (12 to 107) % under SSP1–2.6, SSP2–4.5, and SSP5–8.5, respectively, in the near (far) future. Overall, the full ranges in CMIP6 remain higher than the CMIP5 models, which points towards a higher climate sensitivity of some of the CMIP6 climate models to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as compared to the CMIP5. The CMIP6 dataset confirmed previous findings of changes in future climate over the Arabian Peninsula based on CMIP3 and CMIP5 datasets. The results presented in this study will be useful for impact studies, and ultimately in devising future policies for adaptation in the region.


2015 ◽  
Vol 28 (23) ◽  
pp. 9313-9331 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robinson I. Negrón-Juárez ◽  
William J. Riley ◽  
Charles D. Koven ◽  
Ryan G. Knox ◽  
Philip G. Taylor ◽  
...  

Abstract In this study, the authors used the relationship between mean annual rainfall (MAR) and net primary production (NPP) (MAR–NPP) observed in tropical forests to evaluate the performance (twentieth century) and predictions (twenty-first century) of tropical NPP from 10 earth system models (ESMs) from phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5). Over the tropical forest domain most of the CMIP5 models showed a positive correlation between NPP and MAR similar to observations. The GFDL, CESM1, CCSM4, and Beijing Normal University (BNU) models better represented the observed MAR–NPP relationship. Compared with observations, the models were able to reproduce the seasonality of rainfall over areas with long dry seasons, but NPP seasonality was difficult to evaluate given the limited observations. From 2006 to 2100, for representative concentration pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5) (and most RCP4.5 simulations) all models projected increases in NPP, but these increases occurred at different rates. By the end of the twenty-first century the models with better performance against observed NPP–MAR projected increases in NPP between ~2% (RCP4.5) and ~19% (RCP8.5) relative to contemporary observations, representing increases of ~9% and ~25% relative to their historical simulations. When climate and CO2 fertilization are considered as separate controls on plant physiology, the current climate yields maximum productivity. However, as future climate changes become detrimental to productivity, CO2 fertilization becomes the dominant response, resulting in an overall increase in NPP toward the end of the twenty-first century. Thus, the way in which models represent CO2 fertilization affects their performance. Further studies addressing the individual and simultaneous effect of other climate variables on NPP are needed.


2013 ◽  
Vol 26 (17) ◽  
pp. 6591-6617 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas R. Knutson ◽  
Joseph J. Sirutis ◽  
Gabriel A. Vecchi ◽  
Stephen Garner ◽  
Ming Zhao ◽  
...  

Abstract Twenty-first-century projections of Atlantic climate change are downscaled to explore the robustness of potential changes in hurricane activity. Multimodel ensembles using the phase 3 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP3)/Special Report on Emissions Scenarios A1B (SRES A1B; late-twenty-first century) and phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5)/representative concentration pathway 4.5 (RCP4.5; early- and late-twenty-first century) scenarios are examined. Ten individual CMIP3 models are downscaled to assess the spread of results among the CMIP3 (but not the CMIP5) models. Downscaling simulations are compared for 18-km grid regional and 50-km grid global models. Storm cases from the regional model are further downscaled into the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) hurricane model (9-km inner grid spacing, with ocean coupling) to simulate intense hurricanes at a finer resolution. A significant reduction in tropical storm frequency is projected for the CMIP3 (−27%), CMIP5-early (−20%) and CMIP5-late (−23%) ensembles and for 5 of the 10 individual CMIP3 models. Lifetime maximum hurricane intensity increases significantly in the high-resolution experiments—by 4%–6% for CMIP3 and CMIP5 ensembles. A significant increase (+87%) in the frequency of very intense (categories 4 and 5) hurricanes (winds ≥ 59 m s−1) is projected using CMIP3, but smaller, only marginally significant increases are projected (+45% and +39%) for the CMIP5-early and CMIP5-late scenarios. Hurricane rainfall rates increase robustly for the CMIP3 and CMIP5 scenarios. For the late-twenty-first century, this increase amounts to +20% to +30% in the model hurricane’s inner core, with a smaller increase (~10%) for averaging radii of 200 km or larger. The fractional increase in precipitation at large radii (200–400 km) approximates that expected from environmental water vapor content scaling, while increases for the inner core exceed this level.


2015 ◽  
Vol 28 (6) ◽  
pp. 2332-2348 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Abramowitz ◽  
C. H. Bishop

Abstract Obtaining multiple estimates of future climate for a given emissions scenario is key to understanding the likelihood and uncertainty associated with climate-related impacts. This is typically done by collating model estimates from different research institutions internationally with the assumption that they constitute independent samples. Heuristically, however, several factors undermine this assumption: shared treatment of processes between models, shared observed data for evaluation, and even shared model code. Here, a “perfect model” approach is used to test whether a previously proposed ensemble dependence transformation (EDT) can improve twenty-first-century Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) projections. In these tests, where twenty-first-century model simulations are used as out-of-sample “observations,” the mean-square difference between the transformed ensemble mean and “observations” is on average 30% less than for the untransformed ensemble mean. In addition, the variance of the transformed ensemble matches the variance of the ensemble mean about the “observations” much better than in the untransformed ensemble. Results show that the EDT has a significant effect on twenty-first-century projections of both surface air temperature and precipitation. It changes projected global average temperature increases by as much as 16% (0.2°C for B1 scenario), regional average temperatures by as much as 2.6°C (RCP8.5 scenario), and regional average annual rainfall by as much as 410 mm (RCP6.0 scenario). In some regions, however, the effect is minimal. It is also found that the EDT causes changes to temperature projections that differ in sign for different emissions scenarios. This may be as much a function of the makeup of the ensembles as the nature of the forcing conditions.


2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 195-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Bracegirdle ◽  
Patrick Hyder ◽  
Caroline R. Holmes

Abstract A major feature of projected changes in Southern Hemisphere climate under future scenarios of increased greenhouse gas concentrations is the poleward shift and strengthening of the main eddy-driven belt of midlatitude, near-surface westerly winds (the westerly jet). However, there is large uncertainty in projected twenty-first-century westerly jet changes across different climate models. Here models from the World Climate Research Programme’s phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) were evaluated to assess linkages between diversity in simulated sea ice area (SIA), Antarctic amplification, and diversity in projected twenty-first-century changes in the westerly jet following the representative concentration pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5) scenario. To help disentangle cause and effect in the coupled model analysis, uncoupled atmosphere-only fixed sea surface experiments from CMIP5 were also evaluated. It is shown that across all seasons, approximately half of the variance in projected RCP8.5 jet strengthening is explained statistically by intermodel differences in simulated historical SIA, whereby CMIP5 models with larger baseline SIA exhibit more ice retreat and less jet strengthening in the future. However, links to jet shift are much weaker and are only statistically significant in austral autumn and winter. It is suggested that a significant cross-model correlation between historical jet strength and projected strength change (r = −0.58) is, at least in part, a result of atmospherically driven historical SIA biases, which then feed back into the atmosphere in future projections. The results emphasize that SIA appears to act in concert with proximal changes in sea surface temperature gradients in relation to model diversity in westerly jet projections.


2013 ◽  
Vol 26 (18) ◽  
pp. 7044-7059 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giacomo Masato ◽  
Brian J. Hoskins ◽  
Tim Woollings

Abstract The frequencies of atmospheric blocking in both winter and summer and the changes in them from the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries as simulated in 12 models from phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) are analyzed. The representative concentration pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5) high emission scenario runs are used to represent the twenty-first century. The analysis is based on the wave-breaking methodology of Pelly and Hoskins. It differs from the Tibaldi and Molteni index in viewing equatorward cutoff lows and poleward blocking highs in equal manner as indicating a disruption to the westerlies. One-dimensional and two-dimensional diagnostics are applied to identify blocking of the midlatitude storm track and also at higher latitudes. Winter blocking frequency is found to be generally underestimated. The models give a decrease in the European blocking maximum in the twenty-first century, consistent with the results in other studies. There is a mean twenty-first-century winter poleward shift of high-latitude blocking but little agreement between the models on the details. In summer, Eurasian blocking is also underestimated in the models, whereas it is now too large over the high-latitude ocean basins. A decrease in European blocking frequency in the twenty-first-century model runs is again found. However, in summer there is a clear eastward shift of blocking over eastern Europe and western Russia, in a region close to the blocking that dominated the Russian summer of 2010. While summer blocking decreases in general, the poleward shift of the storm track into the region of frequent high-latitude blocking may mean that the incidence of storms being obstructed by blocks may actually increase.


2016 ◽  
Vol 55 (10) ◽  
pp. 2301-2322 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. J. Rasmussen ◽  
Malte Meinshausen ◽  
Robert E. Kopp

AbstractQuantitative assessment of climate change risk requires a method for constructing probabilistic time series of changes in physical climate parameters. Here, two such methods, surrogate/model mixed ensemble (SMME) and Monte Carlo pattern/residual (MCPR), are developed and then are applied to construct joint probability density functions (PDFs) of temperature and precipitation change over the twenty-first century for every county in the United States. Both methods produce likely (67% probability) temperature and precipitation projections that are consistent with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s interpretation of an equal-weighted Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5) ensemble but also provide full PDFs that include tail estimates. For example, both methods indicate that, under “Representative Concentration Pathway” 8.5, there is a 5% chance that the contiguous United States could warm by at least 8°C between 1981–2010 and 2080–99. Variance decomposition of SMME and MCPR projections indicates that background variability dominates uncertainty in the early twenty-first century whereas forcing-driven changes emerge in the second half of the twenty-first century. By separating CMIP5 projections into unforced and forced components using linear regression, these methods generate estimates of unforced variability from existing CMIP5 projections without requiring the computationally expensive use of multiple realizations of a single GCM.


2014 ◽  
Vol 27 (17) ◽  
pp. 6591-6611 ◽  
Author(s):  
Botao Zhou ◽  
Qiuzi Han Wen ◽  
Ying Xu ◽  
Lianchun Song ◽  
Xuebin Zhang

Abstract This paper presents projected changes in temperature and precipitation extremes in China by the end of the twenty-first century based on the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5) simulations. The temporal changes and their spatial patterns in the Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices (ETCCDI) indices under the RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 emission scenarios are analyzed. Compared to the reference period 1986–2005, substantial changes are projected in temperature and precipitation extremes under both emission scenarios. These changes include a decrease in cold extremes, an increase in warm extremes, and an intensification of precipitation extremes. The intermodel spread in the projection increases with time, with wider spread under RCP8.5 than RCP4.5 for most indices, especially at the subregional scale. The difference in the projected changes under the two RCPs begins to emerge in the 2040s. Analyses based on the mixed-effects analysis of variance (ANOVA) model indicate that by the end of the twenty-first century, at the national scale, the dominant contributor to the projection uncertainty of most temperature-based indices, and some precipitation extremes [including maximum 1-day precipitation (RX1day) and maximum 5-day precipitation (RX5day), and total extremely wet day total amount (R95p)], is the difference in emission scenarios. By the end of the twenty-first century, model uncertainty is the dominant factor at the regional scale and for the other indices. Natural variability can also play very important role.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 481-497
Author(s):  
Mansour Almazroui ◽  
Fahad Saeed ◽  
Sajjad Saeed ◽  
Muhammad Ismail ◽  
Muhammad Azhar Ehsan ◽  
...  

AbstractThis paper presents projected changes in extreme temperature and precipitation events by using Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 6 (CMIP6) data for mid-century (2036–2065) and end-century (2070–2099) periods with respect to the reference period (1985–2014). Four indices namely, Annual maximum of maximum temperature (TXx), Extreme heat wave days frequency (HWFI), Annual maximum consecutive 5-day precipitation (RX5day), and Consecutive Dry Days (CDD) were investigated under four socioeconomic scenarios (SSP1-2.6; SSP2-4.5; SSP3-7.0; SSP5-8.5) over the entire globe and its 26 Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX) regions. The projections show an increase in intensity and frequency of hot temperature and precipitation extremes over land. The intensity of the hottest days (as measured by TXx) is projected to increase more in extratropical regions than in the tropics, while the frequency of extremely hot days (as measured by HWFI) is projected to increase more in the tropics. Drought frequency (as measured by CDD) is projected to increase more over Brazil, the Mediterranean, South Africa, and Australia. Meanwhile, the Asian monsoon regions (i.e., South Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia) become more prone to extreme flash flooding events later in the twenty-first century as shown by the higher RX5day index projections. The projected changes in extremes reveal large spatial variability within each SREX region. The spatial variability of the studied extreme events increases with increasing greenhouse gas concentration (GHG) and is higher at the end of the twenty-first century. The projected change in the extremes and the pattern of their spatial variability is minimum under the low-emission scenario SSP1-2.6. Our results indicate that an increased concentration of GHG leads to substantial increases in the extremes and their intensities. Hence, limiting CO2 emissions could substantially limit the risks associated with increases in extreme events in the twenty-first century.


Author(s):  
David Francisco Bustos Usta ◽  
Maryam Teymouri ◽  
Uday Chatterjee ◽  
Bappaditya Koley

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