Abstract
Spectral analysis of global-mean precipitation, P, evaporation, E, precipitable water, W, and surface temperature, Ts, revealed significant variability from sub-daily to multi-decadal time-scales, superposed on high-amplitude diurnal and yearly peaks. Two distinct regimes emerged from a transition in the spectral exponents, β. The weather regime covering time-scales < ~ 10 days with β ≥ 1; and the macroweather regime extending from a few months to a few decades with 0 <β <1. Additionally, the spectra showed a generally good statistical agreement amongst several different model- and satellite-based datasets. Detrended cross-correlation analysis (DCCA) revealed three important results which are robust across all datasets: (1) Clausius–Clapeyron (C–C) relationship is the dominant mechanism of W non-periodic variability at multi-year time-scales; (2) C–C is not the dominant control of W, P or E non-periodic variability at time-scales below about 6 months, where the weather regime is approached and other mechanisms become important; (3) C–C is not a dominant control for P or E over land throughout the entire time-scale range considered. Furthermore, it is suggested that the atmosphere and oceans start to act as a single coupled system at time-scales > ~ 1–2 years, while at time-scales < ~ 6 months they are not the dominant drivers of each other. For global-ocean and full-globe averages, ρDCCA showed large spread of the C–C importance for P and E variability amongst different datasets at multi-year time-scales, ranging from negligible (< 0.3) to high (~ 0.6–0.8) values. Hence, state-of-the-art climate datasets have significant uncertainties in the representation of macroweather precipitation and evaporation variability and its governing mechanisms.
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Acknowledgements
This study was funded by the Portuguese Science Foundation (FCT), under Grant UID/GEO/50019/2013, as part of Research Project SOLAR (PTDC/GEOMET/7078/2014). All the datasets used in the present investigation are freely available. ERA-20C, ERA-20CM and CERA-20C products were provided by ECMWF and are available through the website http://apps.ecmwf.int/datasets. 20CR reanalysis, and GPCP and CMAP precipitation products were provided by the NOAA/OAR/ESRL PSD, Boulder, Colorado, USA, from their website at http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd. HOAPS precipitation and evaporation datasets were provided by EUMETSAT through the website http://wui.cmsaf.eu. RSS monthly mean precipitable water product was provided by Remote Sensing Systems Version-8 Microwave Radiometer Data, Santa Rosa, CA, USA, from their website http://www.remss.com.
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Nogueira, M. The sensitivity of the atmospheric branch of the global water cycle to temperature fluctuations at synoptic to decadal time-scales in different satellite- and model-based products. Clim Dyn 52, 617–636 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-018-4153-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-018-4153-z