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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Renaud Barbero, Professor Hayley Fowler
This is the authors' accepted manuscript of an article that has been published in its final definitive form by John Wiley and Sons Ltd, 2018.
For re-use rights please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions.
© 2018 Royal Meteorological Society In recent years, numerous studies have investigated the relationship of extreme precipitation intensities with temperature derived from a binning method using present-day weather data. The aim of this approach is that these dependencies, or so-called apparent scaling rates, provide insights on how precipitation extremes could evolve in the future climate. In a recent paper, Bao et al. showed that there is a large discrepancy between the present-day apparent scaling rates—showing a negative dependency of daily rainfall extremes on temperature for Darwin—and the climate change response showing a substantial increase in daily rainfall extremes. Their results provide compelling evidence that it may not be straightforward to predict the climate change response from the temperature scaling. We agree with this statement, but disagree with the physical explanation put forward in that study and think that moisture limitations are the most likely cause. Therefore, we advocate the use of dew point temperatures in scaling studies as a much more direct proxy of the absolute humidity of the air in which precipitation extremes develop, which we think is physically more consistent with the underlying mechanism causing the increase in precipitation extremes with global warming.
Author(s): Lenderink G, Barbero R, Westra S, Fowler HJ
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: International Journal of Climatology
Year: 2018
Volume: 38
Issue: 12
Pages: 4664-4666
Print publication date: 01/10/2018
Online publication date: 17/08/2018
Acceptance date: 08/07/2018
Date deposited: 01/10/2018
ISSN (print): 0899-8418
ISSN (electronic): 1097-0088
Publisher: John Wiley and Sons Ltd
URL: https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.5799
DOI: 10.1002/joc.5799
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