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| Titel |
The ‘dry gets drier, wet gets wetter 'paradigm revisited |
| VerfasserIn |
Peter Greve, Boris Orlowsky, Brigitte Müller, Justin Sheffield, Markus Reichstein, Sonia I. Seneviratne |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2014
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 16 (2014) |
| Datensatznummer |
250089703
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| Publikation (Nr.) |
 EGU/EGU2014-3914.pdf |
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| Zusammenfassung |
| The ‘dry gets drier, wet gets wetter’(DDWW) paradigm has become common
place in studies and assessments of future climate change. Many studies extrapolate
the DDWW paradigm to assess historic changes over land, although analyses of
continental dryness trends yield contradicting results and the DDWW evidence is
mostly substantiated with oceanic data. So far, long-term land-based studies on
dryness trends have only relied on a few datasets and single indices, thereby not
accounting for data and methodological uncertainties. Here we provide for the first
time a comprehensive and robust assessment of historic land dryness changes by
analyzing more than 300 combinations of precipitation, evapotranspiration and
potential evaporation datasets. The realism of each combination is benchmarked
against the Budyko curve and those combinations performing well are used for trend
analysis. Our results confirm previously identified hot spots of changing dryness
(e.g. drying trends in the Mediterranean and East Asia and wetting in the eastern
U.S.), but also highlight that over large extents of global land area (86.4%) robust
dryness changes cannot be detected. Within the 13.6% land area fraction with robust
changes, only the minority (5.7%) confirms the DDWW paradigm. Of the remaining
regions 4.8% display opposite changes (i.e. wettening dry areas and drying wet
areas) and another 3.1% display drying/wetting in transitional climate regions.
In particular, some humid regions have experienced increasing dryness (and vice
versa) with potential consequences for a wide range of socio-economic sectors. |
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