Future projections of temperature and precipitation for Antarctica

Abstract

Antarctica directly impacts the lives of more than half of the world’s population living in the coastal regions. Therefore it is highly desirable to project its climate for the future. But it is a region where the climate models have large inter-modal variability and hence it raises questions about the robustness of the projections available. Therefore, we have examined 87 global models from three modelling consortia (Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5), Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6), and NASA Earth Exchange Global Daily Downscaled Projections (NEX-GDDP)), characterized their fidelity, selected a set of ten models (MM10) performing satisfactorily, and used them to make the future projection of precipitation and temperature, and assessed the contribution of precipitation towards sea-levels. For the historical period, the multi-model mean (MMM) of CMIP5 performed slightly better than CMIP6 and was worse for NEX-GDDP, with negligible surface temperature bias of approximately 0.5 °C and a 17.5% and 19% biases in the mean precipitation noted in both CMIP consortia. These biases considerably reduced in MM10, with 21st century projections showing surface warming of approximately 5.1 °C–5.3 °C and precipitation increase approximately 44%–50% against ERA-5 under high-emission scenarios in both CMIP consortia. This projected precipitation increase is much less than that projected using MMM in previous studies with almost the same level of warming, implying approximately 40.0 mm yr ^−1 contribution of precipitation towards sea-level mitigation against approximately 65.0 mm yr ^−1 .

Keywords

• CMIP6
• CMIP5
• NEX-GDDP
• Antarctic precipitation
• general circulation models