Global Climate Projections - Precipitation

Global Climate Projections

Precipitation

Precipitation is projected to become more variable over most land regions within seasons and from year to year due to continued global warming. It is very likely that heavy precipitation events will intensify and become more frequent in most regions with additional global warming. At the global scale, extreme daily precipitation events are projected to intensify by about 7% for each 1℃ of global warming.

Compared to 1995-2014, the average annual global land precipitation in 2081-2100 is projected to increase by 0-5%, 1.5-8%, and 1-13% under the very low (SSP1-1.9), intermediate (SSP2-4.5) and very high (SSP5-8.5) greenhouse gas emissions scenarios respectively.

Global land precipitation change relative to the 1995-2014 average

Global land precipitation change relative to the 1995-2014 average. The black curve shows historical simulation. Coloured curves show projections under different emissions scenarios. 5-95% model ranges of SSP1-2.6 and SSP3-7.0 scenarios are shown by coloured shading. (Image credit: IPCC AR6)

» Heavy precipitation

Image credit:

Figure 4.2 (b) from Lee, J. Y., J. Marotzke, G. Bala, L. Cao, S. Corti, J. P. Dunne, F. Engelbrecht, E. Fischer, J. C. Fyfe, C. Jones, A. Maycock, J. Mutemi, O. Ndiaye, S. Panickal, T. Zhou, 2021, Future Global Climate: Scenario-Based Projections and Near-Term Information. In: Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S. L. Connors, C. Péan, S. Berger, N. Caud, Y. Chen, L. Goldfarb, M. I. Gomis, M. Huang, K. Leitzell, E. Lonnoy, J. B. R. Matthews, T. K. Maycock, T. Waterfield, O. Yelekçi, R. Yu and B. Zhou (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press. In Press.