Reconciling Precipitation with Runoff [electronic resource] : Observed Hydrological Change in the Midlatitudes.
Geographic Location/Entity; Land Surface; Atm/Ocean Structure/ Phenomena; Precipitation; Runoff; Mathematical And Statistical Techniques; Changepoint Analysis; Models And Modeling; Land Surface Model; Variability; Climate Variability.
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| Online Access: |
Full Text (via OSTI) |
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| Format: | Government Document Electronic eBook |
| Language: | English |
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Washington, D.C. : Oak Ridge, Tenn. :
United States. Department of Energy. Office of Science ; distributed by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information, U.S. Department of Energy,
2015.
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | Geographic Location/Entity; Land Surface; Atm/Ocean Structure/ Phenomena; Precipitation; Runoff; Mathematical And Statistical Techniques; Changepoint Analysis; Models And Modeling; Land Surface Model; Variability; Climate Variability. |
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| Abstract: | Century-long observed gridded land precipitation datasets are a cornerstone of hydrometeorological research. But recent work has suggested that observed Northern Hemisphere midlatitude (NHML) land mean precipitation does not show evidence of an expected negative response to mid-twentieth-century aerosol forcing. Utilizing observed river discharges, the observed runoff is calculated and compared with observed land precipitation. The results show a near-zero twentieth-century trend in observed NHML land mean runoff, in contrast to the significant positive trend in observed NHML land mean precipitation. However, precipitation and runoff share common interannual and decadal variability. An obvious split, or breakpoint, is found in the NHML land mean runoff-precipitation relationship in the 1930s. Using runoff simulated by six land surface models (LSMs), which are driven by the observed precipitation dataset, such breakpoints are absent. These findings support previous hypotheses that inhomogeneities exist in the early-twentieth-century NHML land mean precipitation record. Adjusting the observed precipitation record according to the observed runoff record largely accounts for the departure of the observed precipitation response from that predicted given the real-world aerosol forcing estimate, more than halving the discrepancy from about 6 to around 2 W m<sup>-2</sup>. Consideration of complementary observed runoff adds support to the suggestion that NHML-wide early-twentieth-century precipitation observations are unsuitable for climate change studies. The agreement between precipitation and runoff over Europe, however, is excellent, supporting the use of whole-twentieth-century observed precipitation datasets here. |
| Item Description: | Published through SciTech Connect. 11/13/2015. "ark:/13030/qt5z6497vv" Journal of Hydrometeorology 16 6 ISSN 1525-755X AM. Joe M. Osborne; F. Hugo Lambert; Margriet Groenendijk; Anna B. Harper; Charles D. Koven; Benjamin Poulter; Thomas A. M. Pugh; Stephen Sitch; Benjamin D. Stocker; Andy Wiltshire; Sönke Zaehle. |
| Physical Description: | p. 2403-2420 : digital, PDF file. |