Dynamical adjustment reveals detectable and attributable changes in European winter rainfall

Identifying observed climate change signals in seasonal precipitation, as well as evaluating model representation of these trends, is challenging due to the significant influence of natural variability. In this work, we employ a dynamical adjustment methodology to isolate the contributions from large-scale atmospheric dynamics in the North Atlantic to winter precipitation in the UK (1901-2023) and a wider European domain (1950-2024). We then assess changes in total winter precipitation, as well as the contributions from the dynamical and non-dynamical components separately. 

For the UK, we find a detectable and attributable change in non-dynamical precipitation, which has been scaling at 7.6 %/°C or approximately the Clausius-Clapeyron scaling rate. For the European domain, we find that a north-south spatial pattern emerges, with wetting trends in the mid-latitudes and drying trends in the subtropics. We show that dynamical adjustment methodologies greatly increase the detectable and attributable component of seasonal precipitation changes, which are significantly affected by large-scale dynamical variability.