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Observed heavy precipitation increase confirms theory and early models

Nature Climate Change volume 6, pages 986–991 (2016)Cite this article

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Abstract

Environmental phenomena are often observed first, and then explained quantitatively. The complexity of processes, the range of scales involved, and the lack of first principles make it challenging to predict conditions beyond the ones observed. Here we use the intensification of heavy precipitation as a counterexample, where seemingly complex and potentially computationally intractable processes manifest themselves to first order in simple ways: heavy precipitation intensification is now emerging in the observed record across many regions of the world, confirming both theory and model predictions made decades ago. As the anthropogenic climate signal strengthens, there will be more opportunities to test climate predictions for other variables against observations and across a hierarchy of different models and theoretical concepts.

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Figure 1: Heavy rainfall intensification in theory and very coarse GCMs.
Figure 2: Heavy rainfall intensification in observations and most recent model generations.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme's Working Group on Coupled Modelling and the Working Group on Regional Climate, which are responsible for CMIP and EURO-CORDEX, and we thank the climate modeling groups (see Supplementary Table 1) for producing and making available their model output. For CMIP the US Department of Energy's Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison provides coordinating support and led development of software infrastructure in partnership with the Global Organization for Earth System Science Portals.

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  1. Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH Zurich, Zurich, 8092, Switzerland

    E. M. Fischer & R. Knutti

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E.M.F analysed the data and produced the figures. Both authors jointly wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to E. M. Fischer.

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Fischer, E., Knutti, R. Observed heavy precipitation increase confirms theory and early models. Nature Clim Change 6, 986–991 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3110

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