Tuesday, 11 February 2003: 11:45 AM
Reduced climate variability with global warming
Climate model simulations of the 21st Century show global warming, sea
ice melting, snow cover decreasing, and intensification of the
hydrological cycle when forced with scenarios of increasing greenhouse
gases and tropospheric aerosols. Here we apply a new statistical
technique recently proposed by Vinnikov and Robock (GRL, No.2, 2002) to
analyze how the variability of climate will change with global warming.
Simulations from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (using the
R30 climate model) predict that the variability of the global mean
surface air temperature will decrease. We will using our new
statistical tools to investigate whether or not the data contains
significant changes in variability. The same technique already found
no significant trends of variability for many climatic indices during
the 20th Century record. Results for all these studies and analyses,
along with the utility of our statistical technique will be presented
at the conference. We will demonstrate how this approach can have
profound implications for understanding the impacts of future climate
change.
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