资源环境科技发展态势分析平台

Precipitation clusters are spatially contiguous precipitating regions. Large clusters in the tropics are rare, extreme events that include organized precipitating systems. Changes to the probability distributions of tropical precipitation clusters under global warming are examined using models from the coupled model intercomparison project phase 6 (CMIP6). Every analyzed model projects significant increases in frequencies of both very large-sized clusters and clusters with very large area-integrated precipitation (cluster power). The occurrence probability for the highest historical cluster power values increases by a factor between 4-15 among models in the end-of-century SSP5-8.5 scenario. These changes primarily occur over the precipitating tropics: the western Pacific, Indian subcontinent, central and east Pacific convergence zones, and parts of South America. This spatial pattern is largely explained by Clausius-Clapeyron scaling of current climate cluster power values. Societal impacts of cluster power increases could be acute in coastal regions of the Indian subcontinent and western Pacific islands.