Rising Temperature Difference Between Hemispheres may Alter Tropical Rainfall Patterns

The Northern Hemisphere is becoming warmer than the Southern Hemisphere due to global climate change and this rising temperature difference could significantly alter tropical precipitation patterns.

A new study has revealed this. Such a shift could increase or decrease seasonal rainfall in areas such as the Amazon, sub-Saharan Africa or East Asia, leaving some areas wetter and some drier than today, warned the study by climatologists from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Washington, Seattle.

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"A key finding is a tendency to shift tropical rainfall northward, which could mean increases in monsoon weather systems in Asia or shifts of the wet season from south to north in Africa and South America," said UC Berkeley graduate student Andrew R. Friedman, who led the analysis.

"Tropical rainfall likes the warmer hemisphere. As a result, tropical rainfall cares a lot about the temperature difference between the two hemispheres," summed up John Chiang, UC Berkeley associate professor of geography and a member of the Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center.

Generally, rainfall patterns fall into bands at specific latitudes, such as the Intertropical Convergence Zone. The researchers said that a warmer northern hemisphere causes atmospheric overturning to weaken in the north and strengthen in the south, shifting rain bands northward.

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Even though greenhouse gas warming of Earth has been going up since the 19th century, Chiang, Friedman and their team found no significant overall upward or downward trend in interhemispheric temperature differences last century until a steady increase beginning in the 1980s.

The researchers attribute this to human emissions of aerosols, in particular sulfates - from coal-burning power plants, for example - which cooled the Northern Hemisphere and apparently counteracted the warming effect of rising greenhouse gases until the 1970 U.S. Clean Air Act led to a downward trend in sulfur emissions.

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The regions most affected by this shift are likely to be on the bands' north and south edges, said Frierson, associate professor of atmospheric sciences.

Using more than 100 years of data and model simulations, the researchers compared the yearly average temperature difference between the Northern and Southern hemispheres with rainfall throughout the 20th century and noticed that abrupt changes coincided with rainfall disruptions in the equatorial tropics.

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The largest was a drop of about one-quarter degree Celsius (about one-half degree Fahrenheit) in the temperature difference in the late 1960s, which coincided with a 30-year drought in the African Sahel that caused famines and increased desertification across North Africa, as well as decreases in the monsoons in East Asia and India.

"If what we see in the last century is true, even small changes in the temperature difference between the Northern and Southern hemispheres could cause measureable changes in tropical rainfall," Chiang said.

This bodes ill for the future, he said. The team found that most computer models simulating past and future climate predict a steadily rising interhemispheric temperature difference through the end of the century. Even if humans begin to lower their greenhouse gas emissions, the models predict about a 1 degree Celsius increase in this difference by 2099.

While the average temperature of the Earth is increasing as a result of dramatic increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide, the Earth is not warming uniformly. In particular, the greater amount of land mass in the north warms up faster than the ocean-dominated south, Chiang said.

He and his colleagues argued that climate scientists should not only focus on the rising global mean temperature, but also the regional patterns of global warming. As their study shows, the interhemispheric temperature difference has an apparent impact on atmospheric circulation and rainfall in the tropics.

The researchers' findings will appear in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Climate, a publication of the American Meteorological Society.

Source-ANI