Abstract
Tropical convection plays a key role in regional and global climate variability, and future changes in tropical precipitation under anthropogenic global warming are critical for projecting future changes in regional climate. In this study, by analyzing Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) phase 6 models, we show that changes in projected tropical precipitation in CMIP6 models vary among models, but they are largely associated with the model’s warm pool intensity in the present-day (PD) climate. Models with stronger warm pools in the PD simulation tend to simulate an increase in precipitation in the central Pacific (CP) and a decrease in precipitation in the Maritime Continent (MC) under greenhouse warming. Significant differences in precipitation between the CP and MC regions induce low-level westerly anomalies over the west-central Pacific, favoring sea surface temperature warming in the CP region. This suggests that the associated air–sea interactions result in a particular tropical pattern in response to anthropogenic forcing.
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Data availability
The CMIP6 data used in this study is available at https://esgf-node.llnl.gov/projects/cmip6/. The ERSST data is available at https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.noaa.ersst.v5.html.
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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme and climate modelling groups for coordinating, producing and making available the CMIP6 data. All plots and analyses are carried out using Python v. 3.9 including and making available the CMIP6 data. All plots and analyses are carried out using Python v. 3.9 including supportive packages.
Funding
This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2018R1A5A1024958). MHK is supported by “Study on Northwestern Pacific warming and genesis and rapid intensification of typhoon,” funded by the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries, Korea.
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Material preparation, data collection, and analysis were performed by GP. JSK contributed to the study conception, design and supervision. The first draft of the manuscript was written by GP, and all authors discussed the study results and reviewed the previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Pathirana, G., Shin, NY., Wu, YK. et al. Intermodel relation between present-day warm pool intensity and future precipitation changes. Clim Dyn 62, 345–355 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-023-06918-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-023-06918-0