Will a Warmer World Be Stormier?. Del Genio, A. D. 4(2):291714+.
Will a Warmer World Be Stormier? [link]Paper  abstract   bibtex   
[Excerpt] Increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases have almost certainly played a major role in the observed temperature increases of the 20th Century, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report. Global climate model (GCM) projections suggest that continued 21st Century increases in greenhouse gases will further warm the climate by a few degrees. A temperature change this small may not seem very serious, since local weather can fluctuate by much more than this from day to day. The small global mean change, however, is expected to create large problems in sensitive areas of the Earth system – rising sea level leading to increased coastal flooding, more heat waves and drought, and the disappearance of summer Arctic sea ice, to name a few. Among the most important potential impacts of climate warming are changes in extreme weather events. Global precipitation will increase, and the heaviest precipitation events are intensifying [1], but with regional differences: Wet regions such as the tropical rainforests will become rainier while semi-arid regions of the subtropics expand and become drier. This is only one of the impacts of extreme weather, however. Equally important are the winds, hail, lightning, and fires that result from storms. Will we see more frequent storms in a warmer climate? Stronger storms? Will storm damage escalate? These questions are much harder to answer. Different types of storms – thunderstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes, synoptic midlatitude storms – occur under different conditions, though all storms can be thought of as the atmosphere's most efficient means of redistributing heat from places with an excess to places with a deficit. Global climate models only explicitly represent the atmosphere on spatial scales of 100-200 kilometers, due to the computational demands of conducting many long simulations of future climate under various emission scenarios. By comparison, most weather is generated by processes that occur over kilometers to tens of kilometers. Thus, changes in weather can only be indirectly inferred in climate models from changes in large-scale environmental conditions Finally, unlike precipitation, for which long and reliable historical records exist in some parts of the world, records for other aspects of weather are too short to detect trends or contain observational biases that render trends meaningless.
@article{delgenioWillWarmerWorld2011,
  title = {Will a Warmer World Be Stormier?},
  author = {Del Genio, Anthony D.},
  date = {2011},
  journaltitle = {IEEE Earthzine},
  volume = {4},
  pages = {291714+},
  url = {http://mfkp.org/INRMM/article/14007822},
  abstract = {[Excerpt] Increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases have almost certainly played a major role in the observed temperature increases of the 20th Century, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report. Global climate model (GCM) projections suggest that continued 21st Century increases in greenhouse gases will further warm the climate by a few degrees. A temperature change this small may not seem very serious, since local weather can fluctuate by much more than this from day to day. The small global mean change, however, is expected to create large problems in sensitive areas of the Earth system -- rising sea level leading to increased coastal flooding, more heat waves and drought, and the disappearance of summer Arctic sea ice, to name a few.

Among the most important potential impacts of climate warming are changes in extreme weather events. Global precipitation will increase, and the heaviest precipitation events are intensifying [1], but with regional differences: Wet regions such as the tropical rainforests will become rainier while semi-arid regions of the subtropics expand and become drier. This is only one of the impacts of extreme weather, however. Equally important are the winds, hail, lightning, and fires that result from storms. Will we see more frequent storms in a warmer climate? Stronger storms? Will storm damage escalate? These questions are much harder to answer. Different types of storms -- thunderstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes, synoptic midlatitude storms -- occur under different conditions, though all storms can be thought of as the atmosphere's most efficient means of redistributing heat from places with an excess to places with a deficit. Global climate models only explicitly represent the atmosphere on spatial scales of 100-200 kilometers, due to the computational demands of conducting many long simulations of future climate under various emission scenarios. By comparison, most weather is generated by processes that occur over kilometers to tens of kilometers. Thus, changes in weather can only be indirectly inferred in climate models from changes in large-scale environmental conditions

Finally, unlike precipitation, for which long and reliable historical records exist in some parts of the world, records for other aspects of weather are too short to detect trends or contain observational biases that render trends meaningless.},
  keywords = {*imported-from-citeulike-INRMM,~INRMM-MiD:c-14007822,climate-change,climate-extremes,disturbances,extreme-events,extreme-weather,global-warming,storm},
  number = {2}
}

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