Journal of Climate

Published date January 17, 2014

The Atmospheric Energy Constraint on Global-Mean Precipitation Change

  • States that models from phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) robustly predict that the rate of increase in global-mean precipitation with global-mean surface temperature increase is much less than the rate of increase of water vapor
  • Explains in detail the mechanisms by which precipitation increase is constrained by radiative cooling