John D. Cox in Discovery News has a pungent summary of some recent research. Click through for a better view of the diagram he’s discussing: Slowly but surely, a picture of climate change at the regional scale -- where it really matters -- is beginning to take shape. ….In the March issue of the Journal of Climate, a team of University of Hawaii researchers led by meteorologist Shang-Ping Xie offers a preliminary look at what a relatively uniform warming does to a climate system that is chock o'block with regional patches of hot and cold and wet and dry.From a series of simulations of computer models of different design, here is a robust pattern of enhanced rainfall across the equatorial Pacific during the first half of the 21st Century under a "business and usual" scenario of carbon dioxide emissions…
… Tropical anomalies during El Niño have strong impacts on US climate, inducing dry conditions in the Pacific Northwest and floods in California, among other things. Exact effects of SST warming patterns on US rainfall are under investigation.
Regional climate modeling that gets global warming down to the scale where people live and experience climate and weather is still a work in progress. Whether any of the details of this preliminary analysis of rainfall changes in the Tropics prove out is less important than the general look of uneven distribution of heat and water that emerges. It's not just that wet regions get wetter, dry regions get drier.
What is especially striking is how relatively small changes in temperature have such big impacts on rainfall….
Rain map from Discovery News via the Journal of Climate
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