Abstract
A key implication of the well known wet‐get‐wetter/dry‐get‐drier (WGW) scaling is that model biases in the representation of precipitation and evaporation in the present climate lead to spurious projected changes under global warming. Here we estimate the extent of such spurious changes in projections by 60 models participating in phases 5 and 6 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project. Utilizing known thermodynamic constraints on evaporation, we show that the WGW scaling can be applied to precipitation and evaporation separately (specific WGW scaling), which we use to correct for spurious projected changes in precipitation and evaporation over tropical oceans. The spurious changes in precipitation can be of comparable amplitude to projected changes, but are generally small for evaporation. The spurious changes may increase the uncertainty in projections of tropical precipitation and evaporation by up to 30% and 15% respectively.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | e2023GL106365 |
| Number of pages | 12 |
| Journal | Geophysical Research Letters |
| Volume | 50 |
| Issue number | 24 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 19 Dec 2023 |
Keywords
- Precipitation biases
- Bias correction
- Global warming projections
- Evaporation biases
- Dry‐get‐drier
- Wet‐get‐wetter
Access to Document
- Adam_2023_GRL_WGWDGD_CCBY
Copyright © 2023. The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.