Assessing changes in the atmospheric water budget as drivers for precipitation change over two CORDEX-CORE domains
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Assessing changes in the atmospheric water budget as drivers for precipitation change over two CORDEX‑CORE domains Marta Llopart1 · Leonardo Moreno Domingues2 · Csaba Torma3 · Filippo Giorgi4 · Rosmeri Porfírio da Rocha2 · Tércio Ambrizzi2 · Michelle Simões Reboita5 · Lincoln Muniz Alves6 · Erika Coppola4 · Maria Leidinice da Silva7 · Diego Oliveira de Souza8 Received: 2 April 2020 / Accepted: 11 November 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract This study evaluates the projected changes in the atmospheric water budget and precipitation under the RCP8.5 scenario over two CORDEX-CORE domains: South America (SAM) and Europe (EUR). An ensemble of five twenty-first century projections with the Regional Climate Model version 4 (RegCM4) and their driving Global Climate Models (GCMs) are analyzed in terms of the atmospheric water budget terms (precipitation, P; evapotranspiration, ET; and moisture flux convergence, C). Special focus is on four subregions: Amazon (AMZ), La Plata basin (LPB), Mid-Europe (ME) and Eastern Europe (EA). The precipitation change signal in SAM presents a dipole pattern, i.e. drier conditions in AMZ and wetter conditions in LPB. Over the two European regions a seasonality is evident, with an increase of ~ 25% in precipitation for DJF and a decrease of ~ 35% in JJA. The atmospheric water budget drivers of precipitation change vary by region and season. For example, in DJF the main drivers are related to the large-scale moisture flux convergence, while in JJA over the AMZ atmospheric moisture flux convergence plays only a minor role and local processes dominate. For JJA in the GCMs the high values of the residual term do not allow us to assess which mechanisms drive the precipitation change signal over the AMZ and LPB, respectively. Same conclusions are found for the RegCM4 JJA simulations over the LPB and EA. This points to the importance of the spatial resolution of climate simulations and the role of parameterization schemes in climate models. Our work illustrates the usefulness of analyzing regional water budgets for a better understanding of precipitation change patterns around our globe. Keywords Atmospheric water balance · CORDEX-CORE · Climate change · RegCM4
1 Introduction
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-020-05539-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Marta Llopart [email protected] 1
Universidade Estadual Paulista Júlio de Mesquita Filho (UNESP), Bauru, SP, Brazil
2
Departamento de Ciências Atmosféricas, Universidade de São Paulo (USP), São Paulo, SP, Brazil
3
Department of Meteorology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary
4
Earth System Physics, Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy
Changes in precipitation around the globe have been assessed by the Fifth Assessment Report from Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC-AR5 2013). Regional climate studies for Sout
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