资源环境科技发展态势分析平台

Because of internal variability in both the real world and global climate models, it is unclear whether disagreement between models and observations reflects true systematic differences, or different phasing of internal variability in the short observational period. Here we address this issue through examination of moderate to heavy precipitation in large ensembles of global climate models. We find that model inconsistency with a global observational product is lowest for extratropical precipitation in northern hemisphere winter. The inconsistency is systematically greater for the southern hemisphere winter, but the difference between hemispheres could be due to observational quality. Moderate to heavy extratropical winter precipitation is less inconsistent than moderate to heavy tropical precipitation in most models. Within the tropics, moderate to heavy precipitation is particularly inconsistent with the reference in regions including the Caribbean (esp. during JJA), the northern and southern flanks of the Pacific and Atlantic ITCZ, and the Indian Ocean.