Identification

Title

Changes in Twentieth-Century extreme temperature and precipitation over the Western United States based on observations and regional climate model simulations

Abstract

Trends in extreme temperature and precipitation in two regional climate model simulations forced by two global climate models are compared with observed trends over the western United States. The observed temperature extremes show substantial and statistically significant trends across the western United States during the late twentieth century, with consistent results among individual stations. The two regional climate models simulate temporal trends that are consistent with the observed trends and reflect the anthropogenic warming signal. In contrast, no such clear trends or correspondence between the observations and simulations is found for extreme precipitation, likely resulting from the dominance of the natural variability over systematic climate change during the period. However, further analysis of the variability of precipitation extremes shows strong correspondence between the observed precipitation indices and increasing oceanic Niño index (ONI), with regionally coherent patterns found for the U.S. Northwest and Southwest. Both regional climate simulations reproduce the observed relationship with ONI, indicating that the models can represent the large-scale climatic links with extreme precipitation. The regional climate model simulations use the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model and Hadley Centre Regional Model (HadRM) forced by the ECHAM5 and the Hadley Centre Climate Model (HadCM) global models for the 1970-2007 time period. Comparisons are made to station observations from the Historical Climatology Network (HCN) locations over the western United States. This study focused on temperature and precipitation extreme indices recommended by the Expert Team on Climate Change Detection Monitoring and Indices (ETCCDMI).

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d75q4x12

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2013-11-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

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version of format

Constraints related to access and use

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Use constraints

Copyright 2013 American Meteorological Society (AMS). Permission to use figures, tables, and brief excerpts from this work in scientific and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is determined to be "fair use" under Section 107 or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law (17 USC, as revised by P.L. 94-553) does not require the Society's permission. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form on servers, or other uses of this material, except as exempted by the above statements, requires written permission or license from the AMS. Additional details are provided in the AMS Copyright Policies, available from the AMS at 617-227-2425 or amspubs@ametsoc.org. Permission to place a copy of this work on this server has been provided by the AMS. The AMS does not guarantee that the copy provided here is an accurate copy of the published work.

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact