Human contribution to more-intense precipitation extremes
Human contribution to more-intense precipitation extremes
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DOI：
10.1038/nature09763
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发表时间：
2011-02-17
期刊：
影响因子：
64.8
通讯作者：
Hegerl, Gabriele C.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Min, Seung-Ki;Zhang, Xuebin;Hegerl, Gabriele C.
极端天气和气候可能对人类社会和环境产生破坏性影响（1，2）。了解这些事件特征的过去变化，包括最近北方半球大部分陆地地区强降水事件强度的增加（3-5），对于可靠预测未来变化至关重要。考虑到大气持水能力预计会随着温度的增加而大致呈指数增长，并且大气含水量正在按照这一理论预期雅阁（6-11），有人认为，人类影响的全球变暖可能是导致强降水增加的部分原因（3、5、7）。然而，由于每日观测的可用性有限，大多数先前的研究仅通过模式间比较来检查极端降水变化的潜在可检测性（12-15）。在这里，我们表明，人类引起的温室气体的增加，有助于观察到的强降水事件的加剧，发现超过三分之二的数据覆盖的部分北方陆地地区。这些结果的基础上的比较观测和多模式模拟的极端降水的变化，在后半个二十世纪分析与最佳指纹技术。模型预测的极端降水变化以及未来极端降水变化的影响可能被低估，因为模型似乎低估了观测到的强降水随变暖而增加的情况（16）。
Extremes of weather and climate can have devastating effects on human society and the environment(1,2). Understanding past changes in the characteristics of such events, including recent increases in the intensity of heavy precipitation events over a large part of the Northern Hemisphere land area(3-5), is critical for reliable projections of future changes. Given that atmospheric water-holding capacity is expected to increase roughly exponentially with temperature-and that atmospheric water content is increasing in accord with this theoretical expectation(6-11)-it has been suggested that human-influenced global warming may be partly responsible for increases in heavy precipitation(3,5,7). Because of the limited availability of daily observations, however, most previous studies have examined only the potential detectability of changes in extreme precipitation through model-model comparisons(12-15). Here we show that human-induced increases in greenhouse gases have contributed to the observed intensification of heavy precipitation events found over approximately two-thirds of data-covered parts of Northern Hemisphere land areas. These results are based on a comparison of observed and multi-model simulated changes in extreme precipitation over the latter half of the twentieth century analysed with an optimal fingerprinting technique. Changes in extreme precipitation projected by models, and thus the impacts of future changes in extreme precipitation, may be underestimated because models seem to underestimate the observed increase in heavy precipitation with warming(16).