Premium
Relationship between temperature and precipitable water changes over tropical oceans
Author(s) -
Mears Carl A.,
Santer Benjamin D.,
Wentz Frank J.,
Taylor Karl E.,
Wehner Michael F.
Publication year - 2007
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 - 10.1029/2007gl031936
Subject(s) - precipitable water , climatology , environmental science , tropical atlantic , tropics , atmospheric sciences , oceanography , sea surface temperature , geology , meteorology , geography , precipitation , biology , ecology
We use observations, climate models and reanalysis output to examine the relationship between changes in temperature and changes in precipitable water. In climate models these variables are highly correlated over the tropical oceans, with a similar scaling ratio for interannual and decadal time scales. This result is consistent with the most recently developed satellite datasets. In contrast, scaling rations based either on an earlier version of the satellite measurements or reanalysis show scaling ratios that are inconsistent with models, and are dependent on time scale. These results demonstrate that climate model output is useful for evaluating differences between divergent observational datasets.