Updated regional precipitation and temperature changes for the 21st century from ensembles of recent AOGCM simulations

Abstract

We present an analysis of regional precipitation and temperature changes for different 20‐year periods (20 yrp) of the 21st century from the latest ensemble of global model simulations (20 models) over 26 land regions worldwide and 3 IPCC emission scenarios (A1B, A2, B1). We find that regional warming enhancements and precipitation changes are mostly in agreement with previous generation models (with some notable exceptions). A high level of agreement of weighted ensemble average regional changes is found across scenarios and across different periods within the 21st century. Overall, both for temperature and precipitation, the dry seasons appear generally more responsive to GHG forcing than the wet seasons. Our results indicate that the precipitation and temperature change projections produced by ensembles of current global model simulations show increasingly consistent regional patterns.