DOE PAGES title logo U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Title: Global warming precipitation accumulation increases above the current-climate cutoff scale

Abstract

Precipitation accumulations, integrated over rainfall events, can be affected by both intensity and duration of the storm event. Thus, although precipitation intensity is widely projected to increase under global warming, a clear framework for predicting accumulation changes has been lacking, despite the importance of accumulations for societal impacts. Theory for changes in the probability density function (pdf) of precipitation accumulations is presented with an evaluation of these changes in global climate model simulations. We show that a simple set of conditions implies roughly exponential increases in the frequency of the very largest accumulations above a physical cutoff scale, increasing with event size. The pdf exhibits an approximately power-law range where probability density drops slowly with each order of magnitude size increase, up to a cutoff at large accumulations that limits the largest events experienced in current climate. The theory predicts that the cutoff scale, controlled by the interplay of moisture convergence variance and precipitation loss, tends to increase under global warming. Thus, precisely the large accumulations above the cutoff that are currently rare will exhibit increases in the warmer climate as this cutoff is extended. This indeed occurs in the full climate model, with a 3 °C end-of-century global-average warmingmore » yielding regional increases of hundreds of percent to >1,000% in the probability density of the largest accumulations that have historical precedents. The probabilities of unprecedented accumulations are also consistent with the extension of the cutoff.« less

Authors:
ORCiD logo; ; ;
Publication Date:
Research Org.:
Univ. of California, Los Angeles, CA (United States); Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, WI (United States)
Sponsoring Org.:
USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER); National Science Foundation (NSF); National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) (United States); Office of Naval Research (ONR) (United States)
OSTI Identifier:
1341226
Alternate Identifier(s):
OSTI ID: 1427572
Grant/Contract Number:  
SC0006739; AGS-1102838; AGS-1540518; NA14OAR4310274; N00014-12-1-0744
Resource Type:
Published Article
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Additional Journal Information:
Journal Name: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America Journal Volume: 114 Journal Issue: 6; Journal ID: ISSN 0027-8424
Publisher:
National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC (United States)
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Subject:
54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES; precipitation accumulation; global warming; extreme events; stochastic modeling; first-passage process

Citation Formats

Neelin, J. David, Sahany, Sandeep, Stechmann, Samuel N., and Bernstein, Diana N. Global warming precipitation accumulation increases above the current-climate cutoff scale. United States: N. p., 2017. Web. doi:10.1073/pnas.1615333114.
Neelin, J. David, Sahany, Sandeep, Stechmann, Samuel N., & Bernstein, Diana N. Global warming precipitation accumulation increases above the current-climate cutoff scale. United States. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1615333114
Neelin, J. David, Sahany, Sandeep, Stechmann, Samuel N., and Bernstein, Diana N. Mon . "Global warming precipitation accumulation increases above the current-climate cutoff scale". United States. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1615333114.
@article{osti_1341226,
title = {Global warming precipitation accumulation increases above the current-climate cutoff scale},
author = {Neelin, J. David and Sahany, Sandeep and Stechmann, Samuel N. and Bernstein, Diana N.},
abstractNote = {Precipitation accumulations, integrated over rainfall events, can be affected by both intensity and duration of the storm event. Thus, although precipitation intensity is widely projected to increase under global warming, a clear framework for predicting accumulation changes has been lacking, despite the importance of accumulations for societal impacts. Theory for changes in the probability density function (pdf) of precipitation accumulations is presented with an evaluation of these changes in global climate model simulations. We show that a simple set of conditions implies roughly exponential increases in the frequency of the very largest accumulations above a physical cutoff scale, increasing with event size. The pdf exhibits an approximately power-law range where probability density drops slowly with each order of magnitude size increase, up to a cutoff at large accumulations that limits the largest events experienced in current climate. The theory predicts that the cutoff scale, controlled by the interplay of moisture convergence variance and precipitation loss, tends to increase under global warming. Thus, precisely the large accumulations above the cutoff that are currently rare will exhibit increases in the warmer climate as this cutoff is extended. This indeed occurs in the full climate model, with a 3 °C end-of-century global-average warming yielding regional increases of hundreds of percent to >1,000% in the probability density of the largest accumulations that have historical precedents. The probabilities of unprecedented accumulations are also consistent with the extension of the cutoff.},
doi = {10.1073/pnas.1615333114},
journal = {Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America},
number = 6,
volume = 114,
place = {United States},
year = {Mon Jan 23 00:00:00 EST 2017},
month = {Mon Jan 23 00:00:00 EST 2017}
}

Journal Article:
Free Publicly Available Full Text
Publisher's Version of Record
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1615333114

Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 47 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

Save / Share:

Works referenced in this record:

Moisture Vertical Structure, Column Water Vapor, and Tropical Deep Convection
journal, June 2009

  • Holloway, Christopher E.; Neelin, J. David
  • Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, Vol. 66, Issue 6
  • DOI: 10.1175/2008JAS2806.1

The RCP greenhouse gas concentrations and their extensions from 1765 to 2300
journal, August 2011


Mechanisms of Global Warming Impacts on Regional Tropical Precipitation*
journal, July 2004


Deep Convection and Column Water Vapor over Tropical Land versus Tropical Ocean: A Comparison between the Amazon and the Tropical Western Pacific
journal, October 2016

  • Schiro, Kathleen A.; Neelin, J. David; Adams, David K.
  • Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, Vol. 73, Issue 10, p. 4043-4063
  • DOI: 10.1175/JAS-D-16-0119.1

Reconciling two approaches to attribution of the 2010 Russian heat wave: RUSSIAN HEAT WAVE 2010
journal, February 2012

  • Otto, F. E. L.; Massey, N.; van Oldenborgh, G. J.
  • Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 39, Issue 4
  • DOI: 10.1029/2011GL050422

The Community Earth System Model: A Framework for Collaborative Research
journal, September 2013

  • Hurrell, James W.; Holland, M. M.; Gent, P. R.
  • Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Vol. 94, Issue 9
  • DOI: 10.1175/BAMS-D-12-00121.1

Lévy flights in external force fields: Langevin and fractional Fokker-Planck equations and their solutions
journal, March 1999


An Introduction to Trends in Extreme Weather and Climate Events: Observations, Socioeconomic Impacts, Terrestrial Ecological Impacts, and Model Projections *
journal, March 2000


Changes in precipitation with climate change
journal, March 2011


Identification of human-induced changes in atmospheric moisture content
journal, September 2007

  • Santer, B. D.; Mears, C.; Wentz, F. J.
  • Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 104, Issue 39
  • DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0702872104

Detectability of Anthropogenic Changes in Annual Temperature and Precipitation Extremes
journal, October 2004


Changes in the Distribution of Rain Frequency and Intensity in Response to Global Warming
journal, November 2014


Two Modes of Change of the Distribution of Rain
journal, November 2014


The Changing Character of Precipitation
journal, September 2003

  • Trenberth, Kevin E.; Dai, Aiguo; Rasmussen, Roy M.
  • Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Vol. 84, Issue 9
  • DOI: 10.1175/BAMS-84-9-1205

Percentile indices for assessing changes in heavy precipitation events
journal, April 2016


Simplified models for turbulent diffusion: Theory, numerical modelling, and physical phenomena
journal, June 1999


How Often Will It Rain?
journal, October 2007

  • Sun, Ying; Solomon, Susan; Dai, Aiguo
  • Journal of Climate, Vol. 20, Issue 19
  • DOI: 10.1175/JCLI4263.1

A Complexity View of Rainfall
journal, December 2001


The Transition to Strong Convection
journal, August 2009

  • Neelin, J. David; Peters, Ole; Hales, Katrina
  • Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, Vol. 66, Issue 8
  • DOI: 10.1175/2009JAS2962.1

Changes in temperature and precipitation extremes in the CMIP5 ensemble
journal, February 2013


Anomalous diffusion and the first passage time problem
journal, July 2000


Temperature–Moisture Dependence of the Deep Convective Transition as a Constraint on Entrainment in Climate Models
journal, April 2012

  • Sahany, Sandeep; Neelin, J. David; Hales, Katrina
  • Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, Vol. 69, Issue 4
  • DOI: 10.1175/JAS-D-11-0164.1

First Passage Problems in Anomalous Diffusion
book, March 2014


First passages in bounded domains: When is the mean first passage time meaningful?
journal, September 2012


Testing the Clausius–Clapeyron constraint on changes in extreme precipitation under CO2 warming
journal, August 2006


How closely do changes in surface and column water vapor follow Clausius–Clapeyron scaling in climate change simulations?
journal, April 2010


CMIP5 Climate Model Analyses: Climate Extremes in the United States
journal, April 2014

  • Wuebbles, Donald; Meehl, Gerald; Hayhoe, Katharine
  • Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Vol. 95, Issue 4
  • DOI: 10.1175/BAMS-D-12-00172.1

Precipitation extreme changes exceeding moisture content increases in MIROC and IPCC climate models
journal, December 2009

  • Sugiyama, M.; Shiogama, H.; Emori, S.
  • Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 107, Issue 2
  • DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0903186107

Critical phenomena in atmospheric precipitation
journal, May 2006

  • Peters, Ole; Neelin, J. David
  • Nature Physics, Vol. 2, Issue 6
  • DOI: 10.1038/nphys314

Identifying sensitive ranges in global warming precipitation change dependence on convective parameters
journal, June 2016

  • Bernstein, Diana N.; Neelin, J. David
  • Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 43, Issue 11
  • DOI: 10.1002/2016GL069022

Scale invariant events and dry spells for medium-resolution local rain data
journal, January 2014


Deep Convective Transition Characteristics in the Community Climate System Model and Changes under Global Warming
journal, December 2014


Sensitivity of tropical precipitation extremes to climate change
journal, September 2012


Human contribution to more-intense precipitation extremes
journal, February 2011

  • Min, Seung-Ki; Zhang, Xuebin; Zwiers, Francis W.
  • Nature, Vol. 470, Issue 7334
  • DOI: 10.1038/nature09763

Going to the Extremes: An Intercomparison of Model-Simulated Historical and Future Changes in Extreme Events
journal, October 2006

  • Tebaldi, Claudia; Hayhoe, Katharinec; Arblaster, Julie M.
  • Climatic Change, Vol. 79, Issue 3-4
  • DOI: 10.1007/s10584-006-9051-4

Universality of rain event size distributions
journal, November 2010


Climate extremes indices in the CMIP5 multimodel ensemble: Part 2. Future climate projections: CMIP5 PROJECTIONS OF EXTREMES INDICES
journal, March 2013

  • Sillmann, J.; Kharin, V. V.; Zwiers, F. W.
  • Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, Vol. 118, Issue 6
  • DOI: 10.1002/jgrd.50188

Mechanisms for Global Warming Impacts on Precipitation Frequency and Intensity
journal, May 2012


Fractional Fokker-Planck equation, solution, and application
journal, March 2001


First-Passage-Time Prototypes for Precipitation Statistics
journal, September 2014

  • Stechmann, Samuel N.; Neelin, J. David
  • Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, Vol. 71, Issue 9
  • DOI: 10.1175/JAS-D-13-0268.1