GC41A-1074
Increasing climate extremes under global warming – What is the driving force?
Thursday, 17 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
JinHo Yoon1, Shih-Yu (Simon) Wang2, Robert R Gillies2, Larry Hipps2, Ben Kravitz3 and Philip J Rasch1, (1)Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, United States, (2)Utah State University, Logan, UT, United States, (3)Joint Global Change Research Institute, College Park, MD, United States
Abstract:
More climate extreme events have occurred in recent years, including the continual development of extreme drought in California, the severe cold winters in the eastern U.S. since 2014, 2015 Washington drought, and excessive wildfire events over Alaska in 2015. These have been casually attributed to global warming. However, a need for further understanding of mechanisms responsible for climate extremes is growing. In this presentation, we’ll use sets of climate model simulation that designed to identify the role of the oceanic feedback in increasing climate extremes under global warming. One is with a fully coupled climate model forced by 1% ramping CO2, and the other is with an atmosphere only model forced by the same CO2 forcing. By contrasting these two, an importance of the oceanic feedback in increasing climate extremes under global warming can be diagnosed.
