Understanding Decreases in Land Relative Humidity with Global Warming: Conceptual Model and GCM Simulations

AbstractClimate models simulate a strong land–ocean contrast in the response of near-surface relative humidity to global warming; relative humidity tends to increase slightly over oceans but decrease substantially over land. Surface energy balance arguments have been used to understand the response over ocean but are difficult to apply over more complex land surfaces. Here, a conceptual box model is introduced, involving atmospheric moisture transport between the land and ocean and surface evapotranspiration, to investigate the decreases in land relative humidity as the climate warms. The box model is applied to simulations with idealized and full-complexity (CMIP5) general circulation models, and it is found to capture many of the features of the simulated changes in land humidity. The simplest version of the box model gives equal fractional increases in specific humidity over land and ocean. This relationship implies a decrease in land relative humidity given the greater warming over land than ocean and...

• Publication year

  2016

• Venue

  Journal of Climate

• Publication date

  2016-05-02

• Fields of study

  Geology, Physics, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1175/JCLI-D-16-0351.1arXiv 1605.00380
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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