[1] Winter and summer Mediterranean precipitation climatology and trends since 1950 as simulated by the newest generation of global climate models, the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5), are evaluated with respect to observations and the previous generation of models (CMIP3) used in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report. Observed precipitatio...

[1] We utilize energy budget diagnostics from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5) to evaluate the models’ climate forcing since preindustrial times employing an established regression technique. The climate forcing evaluated this way, termed the adjusted forcing (AF), includes a rapid adjustment term associated with cloud changes and other tropospheric and land-surface cha...

This study investigates projected changes in the length of the tropical cyclone season due to greenhouse gas increases. Two sets of simulations are analyzed, both of which capture the relevant features of the observed annual cycle of tropical cyclones in the recent historical record. Both sets use output from the general circulation models (GCMs) of either phase 3 or phase 5 of the CMIP suite (...

6 The diverse set of Earth System Models used to conduct the CMIP5 ensemble partly sam7 ple the uncertainties in future climate projections. However, combining those projections 8 is complicated by the fact that models developed by different groups share ideas, code and 9 therefore biases. We propose a method for combining model results into single or multivari10 ate distributions which are mor...

In Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) models, the zonal-mean tropospheric circulation shifts robustly poleward in the Southern Hemisphere extratropics in response to increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations. However, in the Northern Hemisphere (NH) extratropics, the circulation response to CO2 is largely absent in the zonal mean and is instead characterized by complex regiona...

Changes in the frequency and intensity of rainfall are an important potential impact of climate change. Two modes of change, a shift and an increase, are applied to simulations of global warmingwithmodels from phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5). The response to CO2 doubling in the multimodel mean of CMIP5 daily rainfall is characterized by an increase of 1% K at all ra...

For climatemodels to simulate the continental energy storage of the Earth’s energy budget theymust capture the processes that partition energy across the land-atmosphere boundary.We evaluate herein the thermal consequences of these processes as simulated bymodels in the third phase of the paleoclimatemodelling intercomparison project and the fifth phase of the coupledmodel intercomparison proje...

Anthropogenic forcings have contributed to global and regional warming in the last few decades and likely affected terrestrial precipitation. Here we examine changes in major Köppen climate classes from gridded observed data and their uncertainties due to internal climate variability using control simulations from Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 5 (CMIP5). About 5.7% of the global total l...

The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) has pronounced influences on weather and climate across the globe. This study provides a direct comparison of the observed AMO-related surface temperature and precipitation anomalies to those simulated in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) models. It is found that the model-simulated AMO-related features are obscured by the glob...