资源环境科技发展态势分析平台

Predicting how regional precipitation will respond to future warming is among the most challenging undertaking in climate change projection. Despite sustained efforts to improve modeling and understanding of precipitation, the overall uncertainty in projecting regional precipitation has not been reduced substantially. Here the potential for more robust precipitation projections is demonstrated through the use of discriminating metrics to subsample a multimodel ensemble. Using a two-dimensional metric of precipitation and its relationship with large-scale circulation indices in East Asia, 31 models in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) are classified into three groups. Models in the top performing group projected statistically significant increasing trends in precipitation and the regional precipitation patterns are more similar to each other than to the patterns in the bottom performing group. In contrast, models in the bottom performing group projected diverse responses, with overall small drying or no significant trends in precipitation.