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The role of external forcing in prolonged trends in Australian rainfall

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Abstract

Based on model output from a multi-model ensemble (MME) of coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation models, it is shown that prolonged trends in Australian rainfall over the southwest during winter and the monsoonal northwest during summer are associated with trends in the large scale Southern Hemisphere circulation. These trends, in turn, are the result of external radiative forcing, including anthropogenic greenhouse gases, ozone, aerosols and land use change. The MME is used in an analysis of covariance method to separate the internal (natural) variability in the coupled rainfall-atmospheric circulation relationship from influences associated with anomalous external radiative forcing. In both seasons, the leading coupled external mode (singular vector) in the twentieth century runs has rainfall and circulation loading patterns with associated time-series that have statistically significant trends. The associated rainfall loading patterns qualitatively resemble the patterns of observed rainfall trends. The circulation loading patterns reflect the thermal expansion of the tropics and the Hadley Cell. A comparison between similar analyses using the second half of the twenty-first century of the representative concentration pathways (RCP) RCP8.5 and RCP4.5 scenarios show that trends in rainfall and the circulation are projected to continue and intensify under increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations. The technique developed here is generally applicable to separate the climate change signal from natural variability in any relevant pair of coupled climate fields.

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Acknowledgments

CMIP5 data is available from http://pcmdi9.llnl.gov. AWAP rainfall data is available from http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/maps. We acknowledge the World Research Programme’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling, which is responsible for CMIP, and we thank the climate modelling groups for producing and making available their model output. For CMIP, the US Department of Energy’s Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison provides coordinating support and led development of software infrastructure in partnership with the Global Organization for Earth System Science Portals. We acknowledge the resources and support of the National Computational Infrastructure at the Australian National University for maintaining the CMIP5 data at the Australian Earth Systems Grid node. J. Sisson provided invaluable assistance in pre-processing the CMIP5 data and in producing the figures. This work was supported by the Australian Government Department of the Environment through the Australian Climate Change Science Program. Comments from P. Lehmann, S. Osbrough and two anonymous reviewers helped to improve this paper.

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  1. Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research, Bureau of Meteorology, Melbourne, Australia

    Carsten S. Frederiksen & Simon Grainger

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  1. Carsten S. Frederiksen
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Correspondence to Simon Grainger.

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Frederiksen, C.S., Grainger, S. The role of external forcing in prolonged trends in Australian rainfall. Clim Dyn 45, 2455–2468 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-015-2482-8

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