Loading…
Projected increases in daily to decadal variability of Asian‐Australian monsoon rainfall
Changes in rainfall variability in future climate will pose challenges for adaptation. To evaluate changes in Asian‐Australian monsoon wet season rainfall, daily data from historical and future (Representative Concentration Pathway “RCP8.5”) climate simulations are band pass‐filtered to isolate vari...
Saved in:
Published in: | Geophysical research letters 2017-06, Vol.44 (11), p.5683-5690 |
---|---|
Main Authors: | , , |
Format: | Article |
Language: | English |
Subjects: | |
Citations: | Items that this one cites Items that cite this one |
Online Access: | Get full text |
Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
Summary: | Changes in rainfall variability in future climate will pose challenges for adaptation. To evaluate changes in Asian‐Australian monsoon wet season rainfall, daily data from historical and future (Representative Concentration Pathway “RCP8.5”) climate simulations are band pass‐filtered to isolate variability on near‐daily, weekly, monthly, intraseasonal, annual, interannual, and decadal time scales. This method is used to quantify changes in variability from 35 coupled climate models for each time scale over the Australian, South Asian, and East Asian monsoon domains. In nearly all cases, the median model change is positive, indicating increased rainfall variability, although with large model spread. The role of increased atmospheric moisture is examined by estimating the change due to an idealized thermodynamic enhancement. This enhancement produces increases in variability that are within the range of the simulated changes under the RCP8.5 scenario, indicating that thermodynamic responses provide a first‐order explanation for the increased daily to decadal monsoon rainfall variability.
Key Points
Daily to decadal variability of Asian‐Australian summer monsoon rainfall increases in CMIP5 projections
Fractional increases in variability are largest for the South Asian monsoon and smallest for the Australian monsoon
Thermodynamic increases in atmospheric moisture can explain a large fraction of the increases in monsoon rainfall variability |
---|---|
ISSN: | 0094-8276 1944-8007 |
DOI: | 10.1002/2017GL073217 |