Rainfall regime trends at annual and monthly scales in Catalonia (NE Spain) and indications of CO2 emissions effects

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Abstract

The pluviometric regime in the Western Mediterranean and concretely in Catalonia (NE Spain) is characterised by irregular amounts at monthly and annual scales, sometimes with copious short episodes causing floods and, conversely, sometimes with long dry spells exceeding 1 month length, depending on the chosen threshold level to define the dry episode. Taking advantage of a dense network of rain gauges, most of them with records length of 50–60 years and some others exceeding 85 years, the evolution of these monthly and annual amounts is quantified by means of their time trends, statistical significance and several irregularity parameters. In agreement with the evolution of the CO ₂ emissions into the atmosphere and the increasing concentration, in parts per million (ppm), of this greenhouse gas, different time trends at annual scale have been detected up to approximately years 1960–1970 in comparison with the interval 1960–1970 to nowadays. Consequently, besides the greenhouse effects on the temperature regime, the influence on the pluviometric regime could not be negligible.

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Physical modeling and analysis of rain and clouds by anisotropic scaling multiplicative processes

Shaun Lovejoy, Daniel Schertzer (1987)

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Historical greenhouse gas concentrations for climate modelling (CMIP6)

Stefan Reimann, Ron G. Prinn, Mauro Rubino … (2017)

Abstract. Atmospheric greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations are at unprecedented, record-high levels compared to the last 800 000 years. Those elevated GHG concentrations warm the planet and – partially offset by net cooling effects by aerosols – are largely responsible for the observed warming over the past 150 years. An accurate representation of GHG concentrations is hence important to understand and model recent climate change. So far, community efforts to create composite datasets of GHG concentrations with seasonal and latitudinal information have focused on marine boundary layer conditions and recent trends since the 1980s. Here, we provide consolidated datasets of historical atmospheric concentrations (mole fractions) of 43 GHGs to be used in the Climate Model Intercomparison Project – Phase 6 (CMIP6) experiments. The presented datasets are based on AGAGE and NOAA networks, firn and ice core data, and archived air data, and a large set of published studies. In contrast to previous intercomparisons, the new datasets are latitudinally resolved and include seasonality. We focus on the period 1850–2014 for historical CMIP6 runs, but data are also provided for the last 2000 years. We provide consolidated datasets in various spatiotemporal resolutions for carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), methane (CH 4 ) and nitrous oxide (N 2 O), as well as 40 other GHGs, namely 17 ozone-depleting substances, 11 hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), 9 perfluorocarbons (PFCs), sulfur hexafluoride (SF 6 ), nitrogen trifluoride (NF 3 ) and sulfuryl fluoride (SO 2 F 2 ). In addition, we provide three equivalence species that aggregate concentrations of GHGs other than CO 2 , CH 4 and N 2 O, weighted by their radiative forcing efficiencies. For the year 1850, which is used for pre-industrial control runs, we estimate annual global-mean surface concentrations of CO 2 at 284.3 ppm, CH 4 at 808.2 ppb and N 2 O at 273.0 ppb. The data are available at https://esgf-node.llnl.gov/search/input4mips/ and http://www.climatecollege.unimelb.edu.au/cmip6 . While the minimum CMIP6 recommendation is to use the global- and annual-mean time series, modelling groups can also choose our monthly and latitudinally resolved concentrations, which imply a stronger radiative forcing in the Northern Hemisphere winter (due to the latitudinal gradient and seasonality).