Global temperature and hydroclimate in warmer climates of the past and future: the Last Interglacial versus greenhouse scenarios
- 1Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Institute for Environmental Studies, Water and Climate Risk, Amsterdam, Netherlands (paolo.scussolini@vu.nl)
- 2Earth and Climate Cluster, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
- 3Department of Environmental Sciences, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
- 4Alfred Wegener Institute - Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, Germany
- 5Earth and Sustainability Science Research Centre, School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
- 6Climate Change Research Centre, ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
- 7Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
- 8Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement, Université Paris-Saclay, Gif-sur-Yvette, France
- 9National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder (CO),
- 10Earth and Life Institute, Georges Lemaitre Center for Earth and Climate Research, Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain‐la‐Neuve, Belgium
- 11MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Sciences, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany
- 12Environmental Change Research Centre, Department of Geography, University College London, London, UK
- 13Physics of Ice, Climate and Earth, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
- 14Department of Natural Sciences and Environmental Health, University of South-Eastern Norway, Bø, Norway.
Past climates contain precious information about the workings of the climate system, and about what can be expected in a changed climate. The Last Interglacial (LIG; ca. 125,000 years ago) is the most recent period of climate warmer than modern, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. Because of this, it has been often proposed that the LIG holds a partial analogy with a future warmer climate forced by enhanced greenhouse effect. Still, such analogy has never been examined in a quantitative manner. Here we address the question: for which scenario, time horizon, regions and season is the climate of the LIG a useful analogue of the future? We use the results of 13 climate models that performed the standard experiments of PMIP4 and CMIP6, and present a comparison of hemispheric temperature and precipitation between the LIG and SSP scenarios of the future. We also two independent assessments of models performance, by comparing their temperature and precipitation to climate reanalysis of the last decades and to proxies of the LIG. Insights gained from this comparison can inform studies in disciplines beyond climate studies, such as hydrology and ecology.
How to cite: Scussolini, P., Bakker, P., De Luca, P., Coumou, D., Bosmans, J., Lohmann, G., Thomas, Z., Turney, C., Menviel, L., Obase, T., Abe-Ouchi, A., Braconnot, P., Otto-Bliesner, B., Yin, Q., Prange, M., Tzedakis, C., Capron, E., Renssen, H., Ward, P., and Aerts, J.: Global temperature and hydroclimate in warmer climates of the past and future: the Last Interglacial versus greenhouse scenarios, EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-15417, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-15417, 2021.
