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Slow and fast responses of mean and extreme precipitation to different forcing in CMIP5 simulations
Author(s) -
Sillmann Jana,
Stjern Camilla Weum,
Myhre Gunnar,
Forster Piers M.
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1002/2017gl073229
Subject(s) - forcing (mathematics) , precipitation , environmental science , climatology , atmospheric sciences , climate change , greenhouse gas , climate model , meteorology , geology , physics , oceanography
We are investigating the fast and slow responses of changes in mean and extreme precipitation to different climate forcing mechanisms, such as greenhouse gas and solar forcing, to understand whether rapid adjustments are important for extreme precipitation. To disentangle the effect of rapid adjustment to a given forcing on the overall change in extreme precipitation, we use a linear regression method that has been previously applied to mean precipitation. Equilibrium experiments with preindustrial CO 2 concentrations and reduced solar constant were compared with a four times CO 2 concentration experiment for 10 state‐of‐the‐art climate models. We find that the two forcing mechanisms, greenhouse gases and solar, impose clearly different rapid adjustment signals in the mean precipitation, while such difference is difficult to discern for extreme precipitation due to large internal variability. In contrast to mean precipitation, changes in extreme precipitation scale with surface temperature trends and do not seem to depend on the forcing mechanism.