TY - JOUR
T1 - The Importance of Accounting for the North Atlantic Oscillation When Applying Observational Constraints to European Climate Projections
AU - Ballinger, Andrew P.
AU - Schurer, Andrew P.
AU - O’Reilly, Christopher H.
AU - Hegerl, Gabriele C.
N1 - Funding Information:
AB, GH, and COR were supported by the European Climate Prediction (EUCP) project funded by the European Commission's Horizon 2020 programme (Grant Agreement number 776613). AB, GH, and AS were supported by the Global Surface Air Temperature (GloSAT) project funded by the National Environment Research Council (NE/S015698/1). In addition, AS was funded by a University of Edinburgh Chancellor's Fellowship and COR was funded by a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. The authors thank EUCP project partners for their support and discussion, particularly Antje Weisheimer.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023. The Authors.
PY - 2023/8/28
Y1 - 2023/8/28
N2 - Variability in the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) has contributed to the recent multidecadal trends observed in European climate, especially to trends in winter precipitation over Northern Europe. However, the current generation of coupled climate models struggle to reproduce the NAO's contribution to multidecadal trends, which has important implications for deriving constraints based on the comparison of observed and modeled trends. An observational constraint based on attribution results, both with and without the contribution of variability associated with the NAO, is applied to projections of Northern European precipitation and temperature, and observed NAO variability is shown to lead to a constraint that overestimates future forced changes. Only after removing the NAO variability is the observed climate change consistent with model simulations, and a tighter, unbiased observational constraint based on the forced signal (without the NAO) can be applied to future projections.
AB - Variability in the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) has contributed to the recent multidecadal trends observed in European climate, especially to trends in winter precipitation over Northern Europe. However, the current generation of coupled climate models struggle to reproduce the NAO's contribution to multidecadal trends, which has important implications for deriving constraints based on the comparison of observed and modeled trends. An observational constraint based on attribution results, both with and without the contribution of variability associated with the NAO, is applied to projections of Northern European precipitation and temperature, and observed NAO variability is shown to lead to a constraint that overestimates future forced changes. Only after removing the NAO variability is the observed climate change consistent with model simulations, and a tighter, unbiased observational constraint based on the forced signal (without the NAO) can be applied to future projections.
U2 - 10.1029/2023GL103431
DO - 10.1029/2023GL103431
M3 - Article
SN - 0094-8276
VL - 50
JO - Geophysical Research Letters
JF - Geophysical Research Letters
IS - 16
M1 - e2023GL103431
ER -