Wetter summers can intensify departures from natural variability in a warming climate.

ABSTRACT: Climate change can drive local climates outside the range of their historical year-to-year variability, straining the adaptive capacity of ecological and human communities. We demonstrate that dependencies between climate variables can produce larger and earlier departures from natural variability than is detectable in individual variables. Using the example of summer temperature (Tx) and precipitation (Pr), we show that this departure intensification effect occurs when the bivariate climate change trajectory is misaligned with the dominant mode of joint historical variability. Departure intensification is evident in all six CMIP5 models that we examined: 23% (9-34%) of the global land area of each model exhibits a pronounced increase in 2σ anomalies in the Tx-Pr regime relative to Tx or P

SUBMITTER: Mahony CR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5823852 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature