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Midlatitude weather is largely governed by bands of strong westerly winds known as the midlatitude jets, but what controls the jet properties, particularly their latitudes, remains poorly understood. Climate models show a spread of about ten degrees in their simulated present-day latitude of the Southern Hemisphere (SH) jet, and a related spread in its predicted poleward shift under global warming. We find that models with more poleward jets simulate more low-level moisture, a warmer upper troposphere, and different precipitation patterns than those with equatorward jets, potentially implicating inter-model differences in moist convection and microphysics. Accordingly, a suite of atmospheric model runs is performed where the deep or shallow convective parametrizations are individually turned off either globally or in specific latitude bands. These experiments suggest that models that produce more shallow convection in the midlatitudes tend to position the jet relatively poleward in SH summer, whereas those which favor deep convection tend to position it equatorward. This accounts for a spread 60% as large as that of AMIP during the Austral summer. Our results suggest that, in the Boreal summer, similar biases appear in the northern hemisphere. The presence of shallow convection in the Northern Hemisphere midlatitudes reduces SH jet shift in a warmer climate in accordance to the correlation between jet positions and shift seen in this season. These results can help explain inter-model differences in the position and shift of the jet, and point to an unexpected role for atmospheric moist convection in the midlatitude circulation.

The effective equilibrium climate sensitivity is generally assumed to be constant in climate change studies, whereas it may vary due to different mechanisms. This study assesses the importance of the different types of state dependencies of the radiative feedbacks for constraining climate projections from the historical record. In transition, the radiative feedbacks may vary with the changes in the warming pattern due to inhomogeneous ocean heat uptake. They may also vary in equilibrium due to their dependence on both temperature and CO2 concentration. A two-layer energy balance model (EBM) that accounts for these effects is shown to improve the representation of any CO2 pathway for the CMIP5 ensemble. Neglecting the nonlinear effects in constraint studies of climate projections from the historical record may induce errors in the estimated future warming. The EBM framework is used to study these errors for three characteristic CO2 pathways. The results show that the pattern effect of ocean heat uptake is not of major importance by inducing a median error of roughly −2% for a high-emission scenario. In contrast, assuming a log-linear CO2–ERF relationship and neglecting the equilibrium-state dependencies induce a larger median error of roughly −10%. This median error is likely due to the non-log-linear dependency of the instantaneous (nonadjusted) forcing, suggesting that the equilibrium-state dependencies do not induce any systematic error. However, they contribute to increasing uncertainties in future warming estimation.

A warming climate is expected to intensify extreme precipitation, and climate models project a general intensification of annual extreme precipitation in most regions of the globe throughout the twenty-first century. We investigate the robustness of this future intensification over land across different models, regions, and seasons and evaluate the role of model interdependencies in the CMIP5 ensemble. Strong similarities in extreme precipitation changes are found between models that share atmospheric physics, turning an ensemble of 27 models into around 14 projections. We find that future annual extreme precipitation intensity increases in the majority of models and in the majority of land grid cells, from the driest to the wettest regions, as defined by each model’s precipitation climatology. The intermodel spread is generally larger over wet than over dry regions, smaller in the dry season compared to the wet season and at the annual scale, and largely reduced in extratropical compared to tropical regions and at the global scale. For each model, the future increase in annual and seasonal maximum daily precipitation amounts exceeds the range of simulated internal variability in the majority of land grid cells. At both annual and seasonal scales, however, there are a few regions where the change is still within the background climate noise, but their size and location differ between models. In extratropical regions, the signal-to-noise ratio of projected changes in extreme precipitation is particularly robust across models because of a similar change and background climate noise, whereas projected changes are less robust in the tropics.

Paleoclimatic proxies indicate that significant summertime rainfall reached the Sahara region during the mid-Holocene, presumably in response to stronger summertime heating in the Northern Hemisphere. Climate models generally do not replicate the enhanced precipitation. As a step toward understanding the response and possible role of model errors, a series of idealized experiments were conducted with the Community Earth System Model in which local atmospheric heat sources of increasing magnitude were applied in the boundary layer over the Sahel and Sahara. In response to this local heating, the cold and moist southwesterly monsoon inflow encroaches farther northward. A source strength of roughly 1 K day−1 produces responses similar to those in a simulation with mid-Holocene orbital forcing imposed globally, while that of 1.5 K day−1 produces a precipitation response similar to that from paleoproxies. The precipitation increases nonlinearly, with a jump at heating of around 1 K day−1, even though the low-level monsoon inflow increases linearly. Competition at low-to-middle levels between drying by a shallow return flow just above the boundary layer and moistening by vertical advection within the layer affects convection and determines the northward extension of precipitation. When the heating becomes 1.5 K day−1, the boundary layer flow encroaches sufficiently northward to weaken the shallow return flow, further aiding precipitation. This novel nonlinear mechanism operates without biogeophysical feedbacks, and suggests that poor representation of the local thermodynamic processes may hamper a model’s ability to simulate dynamical feedbacks and hence the strength and poleward extension of monsoon rains under forcings like those during the mid-Holocene.

In this second part of a series of two articles analyzing the global thermal properties of atmosphere–ocean coupled general circulation models (AOGCMs) within the framework of a two-layer energy-balance model (EBM), the role of the efficacy of deep-ocean heat uptake is investigated. Taking into account such an efficacy factor is shown to amount to representing the effect of deep-ocean heat uptake on the local strength of the radiative feedback in the transient regime. It involves an additional term in the formulation of the radiative imbalance at the top of the atmosphere (TOA), which explains the nonlinearity between radiative imbalance and the mean surface temperature observed in some AOGCMs. An analytical solution of this system is given and this simple linear EBM is calibrated for the set of 16 AOGCMs of phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) studied in Part I. It is shown that both the net radiative fluxes at TOA and the global surface temperature transient response are well represented by the simple EBM over the available period of simulations. Differences between this two-layer EBM and the previous version without an efficacy factor are analyzed and relationships between parameters are discussed. The simple model calibration applied to AOGCMs constitutes a new method for estimating their respective equilibrium climate sensitivity and adjusted radiative forcing amplitude from short-term step-forcing simulations and more generally a method to compute their global thermal properties.

This is the first part of a series of two articles analyzing the global thermal properties of atmosphere–ocean coupled general circulation models (AOGCMs) within the framework of a two-layer energy-balance model (EBM). In this part, the general analytical solution of the system is given and two idealized climate change scenarios, one with a step forcing and one with a linear forcing, are discussed. These solutions give a didactic description of the contributions from the equilibrium response and of the fast and slow transient responses during a climate transition. Based on these analytical solutions, a simple and physically based procedure to calibrate the two-layer model parameters using an AOGCM step-forcing experiment is introduced. Using this procedure, the global thermal properties of 16 AOGCMs participating in phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) are determined. It is shown that, for a given AOGCM, the EBM tuned with only the abrupt 4×CO2 experiment is able to reproduce with a very good accuracy the temperature evolution in both a step-forcing and a linear-forcing experiment. The role of the upper-ocean and deep-ocean heat uptakes in the fast and slow responses is also discussed. One of the main weaknesses of the simple EBM discussed in this part is its ability to represent the evolution of the top-of-the-atmosphere radiative imbalance in the transient regime. This issue is addressed in Part II by taking into account the efficacy factor of deep-ocean heat uptake.