The importance of accounting for the north Atlantic oscillation when applying observational constraints to European climate projections

Ballinger, A. P. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3704-1976, Schurer, A. P. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9176-3622, O'Reilly, C. H. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8630-1650 and Hegerl, G. C. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4159-1295 (2023) The importance of accounting for the north Atlantic oscillation when applying observational constraints to European climate projections. Geophysical Research Letters, 50 (16). e2023GL103431. ISSN 1944-8007 doi: 10.1029/2023gl103431

Abstract/Summary

Variability in the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) has contributed to the recent multidecadal trends observed in European climate, especially to trends in winter precipitation over Northern Europe. However, the current generation of coupled climate models struggle to reproduce the NAO's contribution to multidecadal trends, which has important implications for deriving constraints based on the comparison of observed and modeled trends. An observational constraint based on attribution results, both with and without the contribution of variability associated with the NAO, is applied to projections of Northern European precipitation and temperature, and observed NAO variability is shown to lead to a constraint that overestimates future forced changes. Only after removing the NAO variability is the observed climate change consistent with model simulations, and a tighter, unbiased observational constraint based on the forced signal (without the NAO) can be applied to future projections.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/113061
Item Type	Article
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > Department of Meteorology
Publisher	American Geophysical Union (AGU)
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