ClimaTea Journal Club

Speaker: Leah Birch

Leah Birch will be presenting on the attached paper:  "Sensitivities of Extreme Precipitation to Global Warming Are Lower over Mountains than over Oceans and Plains" by Shi and Durran (2016):

 Many simulations of future climate predict an intensification of extreme precipitation events under global warming scenarios. The global mean increase in precipitation from these simulations is 2% per degree, but some areas of the world could have much larger increases, leading to more extreme and dangerous events. Shi and Durran (2015) have have previously looked at the link between extreme orographic precipitation and global warming, and in this paper (2016), they examine precipitation over the ocean and plains as well. Shi and Durran use an idealized model set up with the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) High Resolution Atmospheric Model (HiRAM) to investigate midlatitude precipitation. They set up a double CO2 global warming scenario and identify extreme precipitation events, finding that precipitation over the oceans and plains is more sensitive to warming. Shi and Durran diagnose the cause of these events to be differences in vertical velocities, finding the thermodynamic contribution to be uniform over all areas.