Trends in continental temperature and humidity directly linked to ocean warming.

ABSTRACT: In recent decades, the land surface has warmed substantially more than the ocean surface, and relative humidity has fallen over land. Amplified warming and declining relative humidity over land are also dominant features of future climate projections, with implications for climate-change impacts. An emerging body of research has shown how constraints from atmospheric dynamics and moisture budgets are important for projected future land-ocean contrasts, but these ideas have not been used to investigate temperature and humidity records over recent decades. Here we show how both the temperature and humidity changes observed over land between 1979 and 2016 are linked to warming over neighboring oceans. A simple analytical theory, based on atmospheric dynamics and moisture transport, predicts e

SUBMITTER: Byrne MP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5948989 | biostudies-literature | 2018 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature