Imperial College London
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DrPauloCeppi

Faculty of Natural Sciences, Department of Physics

Senior Lecturer in Climate Science
 
 
 
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Contact

 

+44 (0)20 7594 1710p.ceppi Website

 
 
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Location

 

725Huxley BuildingSouth Kensington Campus

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{Nowack:2023:10.1038/s41561-023-01183-6,
author = {Nowack, P and Ceppi, P and Davis, SM and Chiodo, G and Ball, W and Diallo, MA and Hassler, B and Jia, Y and Keeble, J and Joshi, M},
doi = {10.1038/s41561-023-01183-6},
journal = {Nature Geoscience},
pages = {577--583},
title = {Response of stratospheric water vapour to warming constrained by satellite observations},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41561-023-01183-6},
volume = {16},
year = {2023}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - <jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Future increases in stratospheric water vapour risk amplifying climate change and slowing down the recovery of the ozone layer. However, state-of-the-art climate models strongly disagree on the magnitude of these increases under global warming. Uncertainty primarily arises from the complex processes leading to dehydration of air during its tropical ascent into the stratosphere. Here we derive an observational constraint on this longstanding uncertainty. We use a statistical-learning approach to infer historical co-variations between the atmospheric temperature structure and tropical lower stratospheric water vapour concentrations. For climate models, we demonstrate that these historically constrained relationships are highly predictive of the water vapour response to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide. We obtain an observationally constrained range for stratospheric water vapour changes per degree of global warming of 0.31 ± 0.39 ppmv K<jats:sup>−1</jats:sup>. Across 61 climate models, we find that a large fraction of future model projections are inconsistent with observational evidence. In particular, frequently projected strong increases (>1 ppmv K<jats:sup>−1</jats:sup>) are highly unlikely. Our constraint represents a 50% decrease in the 95th percentile of the climate model uncertainty distribution, which has implications for surface warming, ozone recovery and the tropospheric circulation response under climate change.</jats:p>
AU  - Nowack,P
AU  - Ceppi,P
AU  - Davis,SM
AU  - Chiodo,G
AU  - Ball,W
AU  - Diallo,MA
AU  - Hassler,B
AU  - Jia,Y
AU  - Keeble,J
AU  - Joshi,M
DO  - 10.1038/s41561-023-01183-6
EP  - 583
PY  - 2023///
SN  - 1752-0894
SP  - 577
TI  - Response of stratospheric water vapour to warming constrained by satellite observations
T2  - Nature Geoscience
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41561-023-01183-6
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/106376
VL  - 16
ER  -
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