Consistency of observed winter precipitation trends in northern Europe with regional climate change projections |
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Authors: | Jonas Bhend Hans von Storch |
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Institution: | (1) Institute for Coastal Research, GKSS-Research Centre, Max-Planck-Strasse 1, 21502 Geesthacht, Germany;(2) International Max Planck Research School on Earth System Modelling, Hamburg, Germany;(3) Meteorological Institute, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany |
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Abstract: | Often it is claimed that the recent changes in northern European climate are at least partly anthropogenic even though a human
influence has not yet been successfully detected. Hence we investigate whether the recent changes are consistent with regional
climate change projections. Therefore, trends in winter (DJF) mean precipitation in northern Europe are compared to human
induced changes as predicted by a set of four regional climate model simulations. The patterns of recent trends and predicted
changes match reasonably well as indicated by pattern correlation and the similarity is very likely not random. However, the
model projections generally underestimate the recent change in winter precipitation. That is, the signal-to-noise ratio of
the anthropogenic precipitation change is either rather low or the presently used simulations are significantly flawed in
their ability to project changes into the future. European trends contain large signals related to the North Atlantic Oscillation
(NAO), of which a major unknown part may be unrelated to the anthropogenic signal. Therefore, we also examine the consistency
of recent and projected changes after subtracting the NAO signal in both the observations and in the projections. It turns
out that even after the removal of the NAO signal, the pattern of trends in the observations is similar to those projected
by the models. At the same time, the magnitude of the trends is considerably reduced and closer to the magnitude of the change
in the projections. |
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Keywords: | Detection and attribution Climate change Precipitation Regional climate models Northern Europe |
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