85th AMS Annual Meeting

Monday, 10 January 2005
Analysis of water recycling in CCSM
Zhao Li, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, AK; and N. Mölders
An increasing of CO2 concentration in atmosphere was observed associated with significant climate perturbations during last century. However, relation between increasing CO2 and regional water availability remains a lot of uncertainties. We present a three-dimensional water recycling model and apply it to CCSM data. Analysis will focus on four regions that are thought to be critically sensitive to climate change in response to global warming: The Yukon-, Ob-, St.Lorenz-, and Colorado-basin. The former two basins are located in the Arctic/subarctic where climate changes are expected to be seen first, the latter two basins have an increasing population and hence growing needs for water. We analyze the residence time of water molecules as well as the recycling ratio for the particular regions to examine the turn-over rate and local effect of radiative forcing on regional water cycle.

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