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...

For the 1960–2000 period, latest generation of climate models (Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 [CMIP6]) shows less global mean surface temperature change relative to pre-industrial than that seen in observations. In contrast, previous (CMIP5) performed well over this period. It has been hypothesized suppressed late-20th Century warming CMIP6 is caused by a stronger aerosol forcing...

This paper assesses the detectability of changes in global streamflow. First, a statistical detection method is applied to observed (no missing data which represent 42 % of global discharge) and reconstructed (gaps are filled in order to cover a larger area and about 60 % of global discharge) streamflow. Observations show no change over the 1958–1992 period. Further, an extension to 2004 over t...

[1] Substantial biases in shortwave cloud forcing (SWCF) of up to 30 W m 2 are found in the midlatitudes of the Southern Hemisphere in the historical simulations of 34 CMIP5 coupled general circulation models. The SWCF biases are shown to induce surface temperature anomalies localized in the midlatitudes, and are significantly correlated with the mean latitude of the eddy-driven jet, with a neg...

Abstract This study examines whether the spread in the climate sensitivity of CoupledModel Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) models also captures the spread in the Southern Hemisphere dynamical response to greenhouse gas forcing. Three metrics are proposed to quantify the “dynamical sensitivity” of the Southern Hemisphere: the poleward expansion of the Hadley circulation, the poleward exp...

Using the coupled general circulation models (CGCMs) participating in phases 3 and 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP3 and CMIP5), simulations of the two types of El Niño event are evaluated. Previous studies using CMIP3 models pointed out that most of the models tend to simulate a single type of El Niño, and have serious problems in simulating the two types of El Niño indepen...

Although much of the energy gained by the climate system over the last century has been stored in the oceans, continental energy storage remains important to estimate the Earth’s energy imbalance and also because crucial positive climate feedback processes such as soil carbon and permafrost stability depend on continental energy storage. Here for the first time, 32 general circulation model sim...