introduction: hydrology cycle of river basins and water resources availability in arid and semi-arid regions are highly affected by climate changes, so that recently the increase of temperature due to the increase of greenhouse gases have led to anomaly in the earth’ climate system. at present, general circulation models (gcms) are the most frequently used models for projection of different cli...

1 The fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) is at present running simulations using state-of-theart models to provide information about the likely evolution of climate over the twenty-first century, with additional experiments to analyse the uncertainties inherent in these projections1. Models that perform equally well for present-day climate produce very different re...

Decadal variability of the East African precipitation during the season of March–May (long rains) is examined and the performance of a series of models in simulating the observed features is assessed. Observational results show that the drying trend of the long rains is associated with decadal natural variability associated with sea surface temperature (SST) variations over the Pacific Ocean. E...

Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. [1] In contrast to Arctic sea ice, average Antarctic sea ice area is not retreating but has slowly increased since ...

We present a selection of methodologies for using the palaeo-climate model component of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (Phase 5) (CMIP5) to attempt to constrain future climate projections using the same models. The constraints arise from measures of skill in hindcasting palaeo-climate changes from the present over three periods: the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) (21 000 yr before presen...

Long-term carbon (C) cycle feedbacks to climate depend on the future dynamics of soil organic carbon (SOC). Current models show low predictive accuracy at simulating contemporary SOC pools, which can be improved through parameter estimation. However, major uncertainty remains in global soil responses to climate change, particularly uncertainty in how the activity of soil microbial communities w...

[1] Current variability of precipitation (P) and its response to surface temperature (T) are analysed using coupled (CMIP5) and atmosphere-only (AMIP5) climate model simulations and compared with observational estimates. There is striking agreement between Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP) observed and AMIP5 simulated P anomalies over land both globally and in the tropics suggesti...