Arthur M. Greene, Richard Seager

Scientific Reports

Published date April 4, 2016

Categorical representation of North American precipitation projections

  • Explores use of the familiar statistical framework of seasonal forecasting for the characterization of 21st-century precipitation projections over North America
  • Finds the frequencies for the low (i.e., dry) tercile increase in the southwestern United States and southward into Mexico and decrease across the northern tier of North America, while counts for the high tercile shift in the opposite sense
  • Shows that as the 21st-century proceeds, changes become statistically significant over wide regions in the pointwise sense, and also when considered as projections on model-specific climate change “fingerprints”
  • States the robustness of these findings makes a compelling case for long-range planning for a dryer future in the American Southwest and southward, and wetter one to the north and especially northeast