M. Hulme et al., PRECIPITATION SENSITIVITY TO GLOBAL WARMING - COMPARISON OF OBSERVATIONS WITH HADCM2 SIMULATIONS, Geophysical research letters, 25(17), 1998, pp. 3379-3382
Recent century-long experiments performed with global climate models h
ave simulated observed trends in global-mean temperature quite success
fully when both greenhouse gas and aerosol forcing has been included.
The performance of these same experiments in simulating observed globa
l-scale changes in precipitation has not previously been examined. Her
e we use a gridded terrestrial precipitation dataset for the period 19
00 to 1996 to examine the extent to which observed global and zonal-me
an precipitation sensitivities to global warming have been captured by
a series of model simulations recently completed by the UK Hadley Cen
tre. There are signs that the model has been able to reproduce at leas
t some of the observed zonal-mean variations in the precipitation sens
itivity to warming. Questions remain both about the quality of the obs
erved precipitation data and about the spatial scale at which anthropo
genically-forced global climate models can be expected to reproduce ob
served variations in precipitation.