Abstract
This study investigates future changes of Global Monsoon (GM) under anthropogenic global warming using 20 coupled models that participated in the phase five of Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) by comparing two runs: the historical run for 1850-2005 and the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 4.5 run for 2006-2100. A metrics for evaluation of models' performance on GM is designed to document performance for 1980-2005 and best four models are selected. The four best models' multi-model ensemble (B4MME) projects the following changes in the twenty-first century under the RCP4.5 scenario. (1) Monsoon domain will not change appreciably but land monsoon domain over Asia tends to expand westward by 10.6 %. (2) The annual mean and range of GM precipitation and the percentage of local summer rainfall will all amplify at a significant level over most of the global region, both over land and over ocean. (3) There will be a more prominent northern-southern hemispheric asymmetry and eastern-western hemispheric asymmetry. (4) Northern Hemisphere (NH) monsoon onset will be advanced and withdrawal will be delayed. (5) Changes in monsoon precipitation exhibits huge differences between the NH and the Southern hemisphere (SH). The NH monsoon precipitation will increase significantly due to increase in temperature difference between the NH and SH, significant enhancement of the Hadley circulation, and atmospheric moistening, against stabilization of troposphere. There is a slight decrease of the Walker circulation but not significant against the inter-model spread. There are important differences between the CMIP 3 and CMIP5 results which are discussed in detail.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 101-119 |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| Journal | Climate Dynamics |
| Volume | 42 |
| Issue number | 1-2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jan 2014 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Funding
This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) through a Global Research Laboratory (GRL) grant (MEST 2011-0021927), APEC Climate Center, and IPRC, which is in part supported by JAMSTEC, NOAA, and NASA. We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme’s Working Group on Coupled Modeling, which is responsible for CMIP, and we thank the climate modeling groups listed in Table of this paper for producing and making available their model output. For CMIP the US Department of Energy’s Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison provides coordinating support and led development of software infrastructure in partnership with the Global Organization for Earth System Science Portals. Twentieth Century Reanalysis V2 data provided by the NOAA/OAR/ESRL PSD, Boulder, Colorado, USA, from their Web site at http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd . This is the SOEST publication number 8759 and IPRC publication number 917.
Keywords
- CMIP5
- Future change
- Global monsoon precipitation
- Global warming
- Hadley circulation
- Walker circulation