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Abstract:

What can we say about changes in the hydrologic cycle on 50-year timescales when we cannot predict rainfall next week? Eventually, perhaps, a great deal: the overall climate response to increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases may prove much simpler and more predictable than the chaos of short-term weather. Quantifying the diversity of possible responses is essential for any objective, probability-based climate forecast, and this task will require a new generation of climate modelling experiments, systematically exploring the range of model behaviour that is consistent with observations. It will be substantially harder to quantify the range of possible changes in the hydrologic cycle than in global-mean temperature, both because the observations are less complete and because the physical constraints are weaker.

Abstract:

The Arctic Oscillation index has increased significantly over the past forty years, and such an increase has been simulated in response to greenhouse gas increases in several climate models. However, it has been suggested that an atmospheric model with an upper boundary in the upper stratosphere or mesosphere is required to simulate a realistic response, and that predictions made with standard climate models are hence unreliable. Here we show that a climate model with a 30-km upper boundary shows no increase in its surface Arctic Oscillation response to doubled carbon dioxide when its upper boundary is raised to 80 km. Neither model version shows a significant Arctic Oscillation response to stratospheric ozone depletion.