Abstract
The United States has witnessed an increase in the frequency of intense and spatially widespread precipitation events in recent decades. Using a high-resolution hybrid ensemble of regional climate simulations, we project further intensification of widespread extremes in the near future. The simulations cover 1966–2005 in the historical period and 2011–2050 in the future period under RCP8.5 scenario and show good correspondence with the observations in the historical period. The projected changes in the characteristics of precipitation events are associated with more frequent occurrence of extreme years where contribution from intense and widespread events to the annual precipitation is unprecedently high. While our findings are consistent with recent trends in the observations, they are in contrast to some earlier studies that project shrinking of precipitation events in the future period, which highlight the need for more rigorous investigations of changes in the spatial extent of precipitation in future climates.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | e2020GL089899 |
| Journal | Geophysical Research Letters |
| Volume | 47 |
| Issue number | 19 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Oct 16 2020 |
Funding
We thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and constructive comments. This research was supported as part of the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) funded by the U.S. DOE, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research. M. A. was supported by the National Climate‐Computing Research Center, which is located within the National Center for Computational Sciences at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and supported under a Strategic Partnership Project, 2316‐T849‐08, between DOE and NOAA. Support for model simulations and data storage and analysis is provided by the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at the ORNL, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. DOE under Contract No. DE‐AC05‐00OR22725. This manuscript has been authored by UT‐Battelle, LLC, under contract DEAC05‐00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The U.S. Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the U.S. Government retains a nonexclusive, paid‐up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for U.S. Government purposes. We thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and constructive comments. This research was supported as part of the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) funded by the U.S. DOE, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research. M.?A. was supported by the National Climate-Computing Research Center, which is located within the National Center for Computational Sciences at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and supported under a Strategic Partnership Project, 2316-T849-08, between DOE and NOAA. Support for model simulations and data storage and analysis is provided by the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at the ORNL, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. DOE under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725. This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC, under contract DEAC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The U.S. Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the U.S. Government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for U.S. Government purposes.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| National Climate-Computing Research Center | |
| U.S. Government | |
| U.S. Department of Energy | |
| National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration | DEAC05‐00OR22725 |
| Office of Science | |
| Biological and Environmental Research | |
| Oak Ridge National Laboratory | 2316‐T849‐08 |