And the «weather» right now, what with the jet stream way south and a weak lingering LaNina still haunting, one system after another dropping tons
of precip on the SW, sure doesn't appear to be fitting in with their projections.
If circulation patterns mean that you get
more precip on land versus ocean, then you could theoretically have the same amount of snow but greater coverage because if it snows on the ocean you don't get snow cover...
Precipitation affects growth, but in the far past you do not usually have data
on precip to factor it out and infer temp.
Luckily there are some decent clod hoppers to shop for, my favorites being straight - up Hunter wellies for
average precip:
All CMIP5 models show increasing
global precip from 2000 - 2100, ranging between about 1 - 10 %, and small increases are visible in both TRMM and ERA - I totals.
Gavin: Monthly
precip data is part of GHCN, but Pall et al used the data from Alexander et al (2006) which is available via HadEX.
More intriguing, there is another graf in the supplementary exhibiting total
precip over ocean significantly increasing.
Yesterday and today, it's been all drizzly and raining on the sunshine parade, but I guess you have to have a
little precip from time to time:)
In the supplementary, Benestad (2018) exhibits data that shows
precip area over ocean declining much more than over land.
Assuming all places
get precip at least once a month, then you'd still expect snow area to shrink in winter if you just had a uniform warming.
TRMM only covers 50S - 50N, but according to the reanalysis data,
precip rates for the study area for the TRMM study area were about 6x that of the poleward areas, averaged over 1979 - 2016.
The dashed curve (i.e. exp1) shows the effect of the modification with the
highest precip occuring after midnight (local time).
In tropics in a GCM warmer = more
precip = higher salinity.
Like the 2003 European heatwave, or the 2010 Russian heat / fire outbreak, or the Australian drought, or the California drought, or the Middle Eastern drought, or numerous extreme
precip events, some of which were relatively harmless and some of which cost billions of dollars and a few more lives, or...?
knock yourself out, i have been playing with
precip there and other places, like ERA - 40, and podaac and such, big time sink
But what if in a «God only knows» scenario in which humans had never evolved & there was no AGW, the Gulf had been slated to be below normal in SST &
precip at the time of Katrina.
So the impact of GW on TCs or
precip does not have to be very much to cause a tremendously greater amount of damage and harm.
Specifically, the
nocturnal precip maximimum that is observed over the US Great Plains during boreal summer (Jun - Aug) was captured in the model only when entrainment was biased towards the lower levels.
I was expecting much less variability, but it seems that this is simply a reflection of how much
precip varies seasonally in monsoon regions.