Journal article
Projections of northern hemisphere extratropical climate underestimate internal variability and associated uncertainty
- Abstract:
- Internal climate variability will play a major role in determining change on regional scales under global warming. In the extratropics, large-scale atmospheric circulation is responsible for much of observed regional climate variability, from seasonal to multidecadal timescales. However, the extratropical circulation variability on multidecadal timescales is systematically weaker in coupled climate models. Here we show that projections of future extratropical climate from coupled model simulations significantly underestimate the projected uncertainty range originating from large-scale atmospheric circulation variability. Using observational datasets and large ensembles of coupled climate models, we produce synthetic ensemble projections constrained to have variability consistent with the large-scale atmospheric circulation in observations. Compared to the raw model projections, the synthetic observationally-constrained projections exhibit an increased uncertainty in projected 21st century temperature and precipitation changes across much of the Northern extratropics. This increased uncertainty is also associated with an increase of the projected occurrence of future extreme seasons.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, 2.6MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s43247-021-00268-7
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Communications Earth and Environment More from this journal
- Volume:
- 2
- Article number:
- 194
- Publication date:
- 2021-09-20
- Acceptance date:
- 2021-08-30
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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2662-4435
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
1194211
- Local pid:
-
pubs:1194211
- Deposit date:
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2021-09-20
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- O’Reilly et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2021
- Rights statement:
- Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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