Future changes in precipitation have been shown to have contributions from both thermodynamic and dynamic processes. Although the thermodynamic part is reasonably well understood (through the Clausius‐ Clapeyron relationship), the dynamic part is not.
Moreover, the spatial pattern of the precipitation change and much of the regional uncertainty in projections of this change, especially in the tropics, are dominated by the dynamic contributions.
Therefore, CLEX researchers investigated the underlying processes for the dynamic part and discovered that changes in the “weather” of atmospheric convergence lines constitute a large part of the dynamic contribution to precipitation changes in a future climate.
The implications of this are not only that we now know the main ingredient for change, but also that it is the weather time scales that we need to simulate well in models for us to predict this important contribution to climate change.
- Weller, E., Jakob, C., & Reeder, M. J. (2019). Understanding the dynamic contribution to future changes in tropical precipitation from low‐level convergence lines. Geophysical Research Letters, 46. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018GL080813