New Study Finds No Evidence Of Global Warming Increasing Extreme Rainfall
By Paul Homewood http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-16-0307.1 This paper, published last month, has some relevance to recent attempts to blame the Louisiana floods on global warming. ABSTRACT Precipitation extremes have a widespread impact on societies and ecosystems; it is therefore important to understand current and future patterns of extreme precipitation. Here, a set of new global coupled climate models with varying atmospheric resolution has been used to investigate the ability of these models to reproduce observed patterns of precipitation extremes and to investigate changes in these extremes in response to increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations. The atmospheric resolution was increased from 2°×2° grid cells (typical resolution in the CMIP5 archive) to 0.25°×.25° (tropical cyclone-permitting). Analysis has been confined to the contiguous United States (CONUS). It is shown that, for these models, integrating at higher atmospheric resolution improves all aspects of simulated extreme precipitation: spatial patterns, intensities and seasonal timing. In response to 2×CO2 concentrations, all models show a mean intensification of precipitation rates during extreme events of approximately 3-4% K−1. However, projected regional patterns of changes in extremes are dependent on model resolution. For example, the highest-resolution models show increased precipitation rates during extreme events in the hurricane season in the CONUS southeast, this increase is not found in the low-resolution model. These results emphasize that, for the study of extreme precipitation there is a minimum model resolution that is needed to capture the weather phenomena generating the extremes. Finally, the observed record and historical model experiments were used to investigate changes in the recent past. In part because of large intrinsic variability, no evidence was found for changes in extreme precipitation attributable to climate change in the available observed record. http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-16-0307.1 As we often see, the computer models show more intense rainfall, because that is what they are programmed to say. As so often though, when the observed record is analysed, no evidence of such is found: Finally, the observed record and historical model experiments were used to investigate changes in the recent past. In part because of large intrinsic variability, no evidence was found for changes in extreme precipitation attributable to climate change in the available observed record. USHCN Data Talking of the historical record, USHCN say their three stations in Louisiana, with the most complete and long running data, are Calhoun, Jennings and Lafayette. Below are the USHCN whisker plots of daily rainfall. http://cdiac.ornl.gov/epubs/ndp/ushcn/ushcn_map_interface.html There is no evidence at all of daily rainfall becoming more extreme in recent years.
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