Combined effects of global warming and ozone depletion/recovery on Southern Hemisphere atmospheric circulation and regional precipitation

Mindlin, J., Shepherd, T. G. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6631-9968, Vera, C. and Osman, M. (2021) Combined effects of global warming and ozone depletion/recovery on Southern Hemisphere atmospheric circulation and regional precipitation. Geophysical Research Letters, 48 (12). e2021GL092568. ISSN 0094-8276 doi: 10.1029/2021GL092568

Abstract/Summary

Ozone depletion led to a positive trend in the summertime Southern Annular Mode (SAM) during the last decades of the 20th century. During the present century, global warming (GW) is expected to contribute to a positive SAM trend while ozone recovery is expected to act in the opposite direction. Here, Southern Hemisphere (SH) circulation and regional precipitation change are studied with a methodology that separates the effects from GW and ozone depletion/recovery. Our results show that a `tug-of-war' between ozone and GW occurs in the summertime stratosphere, propagating to the troposphere where it is manifest in the SAM. However, at the regional scale this `tug-of-war' is not as relevant as the combined effects of other remote drivers of circulation change, which force different kinds of precipitation changes in the SH. For regional precipitation changes, the uncertainty in future circulation change is as important as the uncertainty in global warming level.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/98484
Item Type	Article
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > Department of Meteorology
Publisher	American Geophysical Union
Download/View statistics	View download statistics for this item