How extreme could the near term evolution of the Indian Summer Monsoon rainfall be?

We provide a methodology to estimate possible extreme changes in seasonal rainfall for the coming decades. We demonstrate this methodology using Indian summer monsoon rainfall as an example however it can be extended to other climate variables, regions and timescale conditional to the model forecasts being a good representative of the observations in current climate. We use an ensemble of ~1600 initialized climate simulations from selected seasonal prediction systems to estimate internal variability and how it can exacerbate or alleviate forced climate change. Our estimates show that for the next decade there is a ~60% chance of wetting trends whereas the chance of drying is ~40%. Wetting trends are systematically more favoured than drying with increasing length of the period. This provides a quantitative explanation for the varying trends in the past observational record of rainfall over India. We also quantify the likelihood of extreme trends and show that there is at least a 1% chance that monsoon rainfall could increase or decrease by one fifth over the next decade and that more extreme trends, though unlikely, are possible. We find that monsoon rainfall trends are influenced by trends in sea-surface temperatures over the Niño3.4 region and tropical Indian Ocean, and ~1.5° cooling or warming of these regions can approximately double or negate the influence of climate change on rainfall over the next two decades. We also investigate the time-of-emergence of climate change signals in rainfall trends and find that it is unlikely for a climate change signal to emerge by the year 2050 due to the large internal variability of monsoon rainfall. The estimates of extreme rainfall change provided here could be useful for governments to prepare for worst-case scenarios and therefore aid disaster preparedness and decision-making.

On the attribution of the impacts of extreme weather events to anthropogenic climate change

Investigations into the role of anthropogenic climate change in extreme weather events are now starting to extend into analysis of anthropogenic impacts on non-climate (e.g. socio-economic) systems. However, care needs to be taken when making this extension, because methodological choices regarding extreme weather attribution can become crucial when considering the events’ impacts. The fraction of attributable risk (FAR) method, useful in extreme weather attribution research, has a very specific interpretation concerning a class of events, and there is potential to misinterpret results from weather event analyses as being applicable to specific events and their impact outcomes. Using two case studies of meteorological extremes and their impacts, we argue that FAR is not generally appropriate when estimating the magnitude of the anthropogenic signal behind a specific impact. Attribution assessments on impacts should always be carried out in addition to assessment of the associated meteorological event, since it cannot be assumed that the anthropogenic signal behind the weather is equivalent to the signal behind the impact because of lags and nonlinearities in the processes through which the impact system reacts to weather. Whilst there are situations where employing FAR to understand the climate change signal behind a class of impacts is useful (e.g. “system breaking” events), more useful results will generally be produced if attribution questions on specific impacts are reframed to focus on changes in the impact return value and magnitude across large samples of factual and counterfactual climate model and impact simulations. We advocate for constant interdisciplinary collaboration as essential for effective and robust impact attribution assessments.

Forecast-based attribution of a winter heatwave within the limit of predictability

Attribution of extreme weather events has expanded rapidly as a field over the past decade. However, deficiencies in climate model representation of key dynamical drivers of extreme events have led to some concerns over the robustness of climate model–based attribution studies. It has also been suggested that the unconditioned risk-based approach to event attribution may result in false negative results due to dynamical noise overwhelming any climate change signal. The “storyline” attribution framework, in which the impact of climate change on individual drivers of an extreme event is examined, aims to mitigate these concerns. Here we propose a methodology for attribution of extreme weather events using the operational European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) medium-range forecast model that successfully predicted the event. The use of a successful forecast ensures not only that the model is able to accurately represent the event in question, but also that the analysis is unequivocally an attribution of this specific event, rather than a mixture of multiple different events that share some characteristic. Since this attribution methodology is conditioned on the component of the event that was predictable at forecast initialization, we show how adjusting the lead time of the forecast can flexibly set the level of conditioning desired. This flexible adjustment of the conditioning allows us to synthesize between a storyline (highly conditioned) and a risk-based (relatively unconditioned) approach. We demonstrate this forecast-based methodology through a partial attribution of the direct radiative effect of increased CO2 concentrations on the exceptional European winter heatwave of February 2019.

Evaluating quantile-based bias adjustment methods for climate change scenarios

Daily meteorological data such as temperature or precipitation from climate models is needed for many climate impact studies, e.g. in hydrology or agriculture but direct model output can contain large systematic errors. Thus, statistical bias adjustment is applied to correct climate model outputs. Here we review existing statistical bias adjustment methods and their shortcomings, and present a method which we call EQA (Empirical Quantile Adjustment), a development of the methods EDCDFm and PresRAT. We then test it in comparison to two existing methods using real and artificially created daily temperature and precipitation data for Austria. We compare the performance of the three methods in terms of the following demands: (1): The model data should match the climatological means of the observational data in the historical period. (2): The long-term climatological trends of means (climate change signal), either defined as difference or as ratio, should not be altered during bias adjustment, and (3): Even models with too few wet days (precipitation above 0.1 mm) should be corrected accurately, so that the wet day frequency is conserved. EQA fulfills (1) almost exactly and (2) at least for temperature. For precipitation, an additional correction included in EQA assures that the climate change signal is conserved, and for (3), we apply another additional algorithm to add precipitation days.

Impact of Bias Correction on Present and Mid-Future Rainfall Projections over Senegal

In this study, we analyze the impact of bias correction models on present and future precipitation and extremes rainfall events over Senegal. The commonly used linear scaling (LS) bias correction method has been applied on four (4) regional climate models (RCMs) of the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) program. The linear scaling bias correction method was firstly calibrated and validated during the 1976-1990 and 1991-2005 periods, respectively. The comparison with the observed data revealed that the linear scaling method significantly improves the mean and the extreme precipitations during the validation period. The RCMs generally simulate a decrease of rainfall in the mid-twenty-first century under the RCP8.5 greenhouse gas concentration pathway compared to the reference period (1976-2005), except for the CCLM4 and the RCA4 models which show respectively a slight increase overall Senegal and the east of the country. The changes in precipitation indices such as the number of wet days (R1mm) and mean frequency of heavy rainfall events (R20mm) follows that mean precipitation change distribution. Almost uncorrected RCMs (except RCA4) predict during the near future an increase in of the mean intensity of daily rainfall events (SDII), the mean intensity of precipitation events above the 95th Percentile (R95PTOT) and the mean maximum dry spells length (CDD), whereas a decrease in the mean maximum wet spells length (CWD) is projected. After applying the LS bias correction, the spatial distribution patterns are not so much modified in all the models but the magnitude of the climate change signal is either amplified or moderated depending on the considered variables.

Decline of sea-ice in the Greenland Sea intensifies extreme precipitation over Svalbard

Extreme precipitation over the Svalbard Archipelago in the Arctic can have severe consequences for the ecosystem and society. In recent years several extreme precipitation events have been observed at Ny Ålesund, a weather station in the north-western part of the Svalbard Archipelago. The most recent observed events in the years 2012, 2016, and 2018 were the highest events in the entire precipitation record from 1974 till today. The key question of our study is whether those recently observed extremes are part of a climate change signal or are a random accumulation of extremes. With a novel approach based on a large ensemble of model simulations, we show that the likelihood of occurrence for extreme precipitation over Svalbard has increased over the last four decades. We find that the likelihood of occurrence is connected to the sea ice extent east of Greenland because the presence of sea ice shields the west coast of Svalbard from the incoming southerly moist air. Our analysis suggests, that in the future with a further decline of the sea ice coverage east of Greenland, the recently observed precipitation extremes will become even more frequent.

The inherent uncertainty of precipitation variability, trends, and extremes due to internal variability, with implications for Western US water resources

The approximately century-long instrumental record of precipitation over land reflects a single sampling of internal variability. Thus, the spatiotemporal evolution of the observations is only one realization of `what could have occurred' given the same climate system and boundary conditions, but different initial conditions. While climate models can be used to produce initial-condition large ensembles that explicitly sample different sequences of internal variability, an analogous approach is not possible for the real world. Here, we explore the use of a statistical model for monthly precipitation to generate synthetic ensembles based on a single record. When tested within the context of the NCAR Community Earth System Model version 1 Large Ensemble (CESM1-LE), we find that the synthetic ensemble can closely reproduce the spatiotemporal statistics of variability and trends in winter precipitation over the extended contiguous United States, and that it is difficult to infer the climate change signal in a single record given the magnitude of the variability. We additionally create a synthetic ensemble based on the Global Precipitation Climatology Centre (GPCC) dataset, termed the GPCC-synth-LE; comparison of the GPCC-synth-LE with the CESM1-based ensembles reveals differences in the spatial structures and magnitudes of variability, highlighting the advantages of an observationally-based ensemble. We finally use the GPCC-synth-LE to analyze three water resource metrics in the Upper Colorado River Basin: frequency of dry, wet, and whiplash years. Thirty-one year ‘climatologies’ in the GPCC-synth-LE can differ by over 20% in these key water resource metrics due to sampling of internal variability, and individual ensemble members in the GPCC-synth-LE can exhibit large near-monotonic trends over the course of the last century due to sampling of variability alone.

Temperature and Precipitation Extremes over the Iberian Peninsula under Climate Change Scenarios: A Review

This paper presents the results of a systematic review of temperature and precipitation extremes over the Iberian Peninsula, focusing on observed changes in temperature and precipitation during the past years and what are the projected changes by the end of the 21st century. The purpose of this review is to assess the current literature about extreme events and their change under global warming. Observational and climate modeling studies from the past decade were considered in this review. Based on observational evidence and in climate modeling experiments, mean and maximum temperatures are projected to increase about 2 °C around the mid-century and up to 4 °C by the end of the century. The more pronounced warming is expected in summer for the central-south region of IP, with temperatures reaching 6 °C to 8 °C around 2100. Days with maximum temperature exceeding 30 °C and 40 °C will become more common (20 to 50 days/year), and the heatwaves will be 7 to 10 times more frequent. Significative reduction in events related to cold extremes. The climate change signal for precipitation in IP shows a considerable decline in precipitation (10–15%) for all seasons except winter. It is predicted that heavy precipitation will increase by 7% to 15%. Extreme precipitation will increase slightly (5%) by mid-century, then decline to 0% by 2100. Significant reduction in wet days (40% to 60%) followed by a dryness trend more pronounced by the end of the century.

Natural climate variability is an important aspect of future projections of snow water resources and rain-on-snow events

Climate projection studies of future changes in snow conditions and resulting rain-on-snow (ROS) flood events are subject to large uncertainties. Typically, emission scenario uncertainties and climate model uncertainties are included. This is the first study on this topic to also include quantification of natural climate variability, which is the dominant uncertainty for precipitation at local scales with large implications for e.g. runoff projections. To quantify natural climate variability, a weather generator was applied to simulate inherently consistent climate variables for multiple realizations of current and future climates at 100 m spatial and hourly temporal resolution over a 12 × 12 km high-altitude study area in the Swiss Alps. The output of the weather generator was used as input for subsequent simulations with an energy balance snow model. The climate change signal for snow water resources stands out as early as mid-century from the noise originating from the three sources of uncertainty investigated, namely uncertainty in emission scenarios, uncertainty in climate models, and natural climate variability. For ROS events, a climate change signal toward more frequent and intense events was found for an RCP 8.5 scenario at high elevations at the end of the century, consistently with other studies. However, for ROS events with a substantial contribution of snowmelt to runoff (>20 %), the climate change signal was largely masked by sources of uncertainty. Only those ROS events where snowmelt does not play an important role during the event will occur considerably more frequently in the future, while ROS events with substantial snowmelt contribution will mainly occur earlier in the year but not more frequently. There are two reasons for this: first, although it will rain more frequently in midwinter, the snowpack will typically still be too cold and dry and thus cannot contribute significantly to runoff; second, the very rapid decline in snowpack toward early summer, when conditions typically prevail for substantial contributions from snowmelt, will result in a large decrease in ROS events at that time of the year. Finally, natural climate variability is the primary source of uncertainty in projections of ROS metrics until the end of the century, contributing more than 70 % of the total uncertainty. These results imply that both the inclusion of natural climate variability and the use of a snow model, which includes a physically-based processes representation of water retention, are important for ROS projections at the local scale.

Climate change signal in global agriculture emerges earlier in new generation of climate and crop models

Potential climate-related impacts on future crop yield are a major societal concern first surveyed in a harmonized multi-model effort in 2014. We report here on new 21st-century projections using ensembles of latest-generation crop and climate models. Results suggest markedly more pessimistic yield responses for maize, soybean, and rice compared to the original ensemble. Mean end-of-century maize productivity is shifted from +5 to -6% (SSP126) and +1 to -24% (SSP585) — explained by warmer climate projections and improved crop model sensitivities. In contrast, wheat shows stronger gains (+9 shifted to +18%, SSP585), linked to higher CO2 concentrations and expanded high-latitude gains. The ‘emergence’ of climate impacts — when the change signal emerges from the noise — consistently occurs earlier in the new projections for several main producing regions before 2040. While future yield estimates remain uncertain, these results suggest that major breadbasket regions will face distinct anthropogenic climatic risks sooner than previously anticipated.