Regional scaling of annual mean precipitation and water availability with global temperature change

Changes in regional water availability belong to the most crucial potential impacts of anthropogenic climate change, but are highly uncertain. It is thus of key importance for stakeholders to assess the possible implications of different global temperature thresholds on these quantities. Using a subset of climate model simulations from the fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5), we derive here the sensitivity of regional changes in precipitation and in precipitation minus evapotranspiration to global temperature changes. The simulations span the full range of available emission scenarios, and the sensitivities are derived using a modified pattern scaling approach. The applied approach assumes linear relationships on global temperature changes while thoroughly addressing associated uncertainties via resampling methods. This allows us to assess the full distribution of the simulations in a probabilistic sense. Northern high-latitude regions display robust responses towards wetting, while subtropical regions display a tendency towards drying but with a large range of responses. Even though both internal variability and the scenario choice play an important role in the overall spread of the simulations, the uncertainty stemming from the climate model choice usually accounts for about half of the total uncertainty in most regions. We additionally assess the implications of limiting global mean temperature warming to values below (i) 2 K or (ii) 1.5 K (as stated within the 2015 Paris Agreement). We show that opting for the 1.5 K target might just slightly influence the mean response, but could substantially reduce the risk of experiencing extreme changes in regional water availability

Today's virtual water consumption and trade under future water scarcity

The populations of most nations consume products of both domestic and foreign origin, importing together with the products the water which is expended abroad for their production (termed 'virtual water'). Therefore, any investigation of the sustainability of present-day water consumption under future climate change needs to consider the effects of potentially reduced water availability both on domestic water resources and on the trades of virtual water. Here we use combinations of Global Climate and Global Impact Models from the ISI–MIP ensemble to derive patterns of future water availability under the RCP2.6 and RCP8.5 greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations scenarios. We assess the effects of reduced water availability in these scenarios on national water consumptions and virtual water trades through a simple accounting scheme based on the water footprint concept. We thereby identify countries where the water footprint within the country area is reduced due to a reduced within-area water availability, most prominently in the Mediterranean and some African countries. National water consumption in countries such as Russia, which are non-water scarce by themselves, can be affected through reduced imports from water scarce countries. We find overall stronger effects of the higher GHG concentrations scenario, although the model range of climate projections for single GHG concentrations scenarios is in itself larger than the differences induced by the GHG concentrations scenarios. Our results highlight that, for both investigated GHG concentration scenarios, the current water consumption and virtual water trades cannot be sustained into the future due to the projected patterns of reduced water availability

Modeling land-climate coupling in Europe: Impact of land surface representation on climate variability and extremes

Land-climate coupling has been shown to be important for European summer climate variability and extreme events. However, the sensitivity of these feedbacks to land surface model (LSM) choice has been little investigated up to now. In this study, we assess the impact of the LSM on the simulated climate variability in a regional climate model (RCM). The experiments were conducted with the COSMO-CLM2RCM. COSMO-CLM2can be run with two alternative LSMs, the 2nd-generation LSM TERRA_ML or the more sophisticated 3rd-generation LSM Community Land Model (CLM3.5). The analyzed simulations include control and sensitivity experiments with prescribed soil moisture (dry or wet). Using CLM3.5 instead of TERRA_ML improves the simulated temperature variability by alleviating an overestimation of temperature inter-annual variability in the RCM. Also, the representation of the probability density functions of daily maximum summer temperature is improved when using the more advanced LSM. The reduced climate variability is linked to a larger ground heat flux and smaller variability in soil moisture and short-wave radiation. The latter effect results from the coupling of the LSM to the atmospheric module. In addition, using CLM3.5 reduces the sensitivity of COSMO-CLM2to extreme soil moisture conditions. An analysis assessing the relationship between the standard precipitation index and the subsequent number of hot days in summer reveals a better representation of this relationship using CLM3.5. Hence, we find that biases in climate variability and extremes can be reduced and the representation of land-climate coupling can be improved with the use of the more sophisticated LSM

Historical Land-Cover Change Impacts on Climate: Comparative Assessment of LUCID and CMIP5 Multimodel Experiments

During the industrial period, many regions experienced a reduction in forest cover and an expansion of agricultural areas, in particular North America, northern Eurasia, and South Asia. Here, results from the Land-Use and Climate, Identification of Robust Impacts (LUCID) and CMIP5 model intercomparison projects are compared in order to investigate how land-cover changes (LCC) in these regions have locally impacted the biophysical land surface properties, like albedo and evapotranspiration, and how this has affected seasonal mean temperature as well as its diurnal cycle. The impact of LCC is extracted from climate simulations, including all historical forcings, using a method that is shown to capture well the sign and the seasonal cycle of the impacts diagnosed from single-forcing experiments in most cases. The model comparison reveals that both the LUCID and CMIP5 models agree on the albedo-induced reduction of mean winter temperatures over midlatitudes. In contrast, there is less agreement concerning the response of the latent heat flux and, subsequently, mean temperature during summer, when evaporative cooling plays a more important role. Overall, a majority of models exhibit a local warming effect of LCC during this season, contrasting with results from the LUCID studies. A striking result is that none of the analyzed models reproduce well the changes in the diurnal cycle identified in present-day observations of the effect of deforestation. However, overall the CMIP5 models better simulate the observed summer daytime warming effect compared to the LUCID models, as well as the winter nighttime cooling effect

Climate engineering of vegetated land for hot extremes mitigation: An Earth system model sensitivity study

Various climate engineering schemes have been proposed as a way to curb anthropogenic climate change. Land climate engineering schemes aiming to reduce the amount of solar radiation absorbed at the surface by changes in land surface albedo have been considered in a limited number of investigations. However, global studies on this topic have generally focused on the impacts on mean climate rather than extremes. Here we present the results of a series of transient global climate engineering sensitivity experiments performed with the Community Earth System Model over the time period 1950–2100 under historical and Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 scenarios. Four sets of experiments are performed in which the surface albedo over snow-free vegetated grid points is increased respectively by 0.05, 0.10, 0.15, and 0.20. The simulations show a preferential cooling of hot extremes relative to mean temperatures throughout the Northern midlatitudes during boreal summer under the late twentieth century conditions. Two main mechanisms drive this response: On the one hand, a stronger efficacy of the albedo-induced radiative forcing on days with high incoming shortwave radiation and, on the other hand, enhanced soil moisture-induced evaporative cooling during the warmest days relative to the control simulation due to accumulated soil moisture storage and reduced drying. The latter effect is dominant in summer in midlatitude regions and also implies a reduction of summer drought conditions. It thus constitutes another important benefit of surface albedo modifications in reducing climate change impacts. The simulated response for the end of the 21st century conditions is of the same sign as that for the end of the twentieth century conditions but indicates an increasing absolute impact of land surface albedo increases in reducing mean and extreme temperatures under enhanced greenhouse gas forcing

Constraining future terrestrial carbon cycle projections using observation‐based water and carbon flux estimates

The terrestrial biosphere is currently acting as a sink for about a third of the total anthropogenic CO2 emissions. However, the future fate of this sink in the coming decades is very uncertain, as current earth system models (ESMs) simulate diverging responses of the terrestrial carbon cycle to upcoming climate change. Here, we use observation-based constraints of water and carbon fluxes to reduce uncertainties in the projected terrestrial carbon cycle response derived from simulations of ESMs conducted as part of the 5th phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5). We find in the ESMs a clear linear relationship between present-day evapotranspiration (ET) and gross primary productivity (GPP), as well as between these present-day fluxes and projected changes in GPP, thus providing an emergent constraint on projected GPP. Constraining the ESMs based on their ability to simulate present-day ET and GPP leads to a substantial decrease in the projected GPP and to a ca. 50% reduction in the associated model spread in GPP by the end of the century. Given the strong correlation between projected changes in GPP and in NBP in the ESMs, applying the constraints on net biome productivity (NBP) reduces the model spread in the projected land sink by more than 30% by 2100. Moreover, the projected decline in the land sink is at least doubled in the constrained ensembles and the probability that the terrestrial biosphere is turned into a net carbon source by the end of the century is strongly increased. This indicates that the decline in the future land carbon uptake might be stronger than previously thought, which would have important implications for the rate of increase in the atmospheric CO2 concentration and for future climate change

A comparison of automatic protocol generation techniques

Due to the increasing complexity of applications and the availability of high speed networks classical protocols have become the main bottleneck in communication systems. Although tailored protocols are able to respond to the needs of a given application their development is expensive in terms of time and effort. An automatic protocogeneration environment is most desirable. Two approaches currently used are the stub compilation and the runtime adaptive techniques. We have studied these two approaches and the behaviour of the resulting tailored transport protocols. Relative performance comparisons and discussions about these two approaches are presented in this paper