The Spatial Structure of Tropical Rainfall and Climate Change

The structure of global tropical rainfall has sharply defined features, and it is also susceptible to change.  Professor Chiang will outline an argument for how this structure may have changed in the past, and with implications for the future.  Several lines of evidence â€" paleoclimate observations, model simulations, and theory â€" suggest that thermal forcing originating from the extratropics shifts the latitudinal position of the Intertropical Convergence Zone and alters rainfall over Northern Hemisphere summer monsoon regions. This change is associated with a characteristic interhemispheric pattern of temperature response, and a northward anomalous cross-equatorial atmospheric energy transport induced by differences in the energy flux entering each hemisphere. He will discuss how understanding the causes of this ‘interhemispheric pattern’ of response can inform us about multidecadal and longer-timescale forced changes in tropical rainfall over the 20th and 21st centuries.

Speaker: John chiang, UC Berkeley