[OANNES Foro] OCEAN SALINITY: Dry regions will become drier and wet regions will become wetter in response to warming

[Mario Cabrejos]

Science 27 April 2012 
Vol. 336 no. 6080 

p. 405 
DOI: 10.1126/science.336.6080.405 

Global Warming 
The Greenhouse Is Making the Water-Poor Even Poorer
Richard A. Kerr

Summary
The question of how bad global warming will get has long been cast in terms of how hot the world will get. But perhaps more important will be how much rising greenhouse gases crank up the water cycle. Theory and models predict that a strengthening greenhouse will increase precipitation where it is already relatively high and decrease it where it is already low. A new study of the ocean's changing salinity on page 455 of this week's issue of Science confirms that this mechanism of water-cycle amplification has been operating for the past half-century. The result also suggests that the water cycle is intensifying quickly under global warming-twice as fast as climate models have been predicting. 

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pp. 455-458 
DOI: 10.1126/science.1212222 

Ocean Salinities Reveal Strong Global Water Cycle Intensification During 1950 to 2000
Paul J. Durack1,2,3,4,*, Susan E. Wijffels1,3, Richard J. Matear1,3
1Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) Marine and Atmospheric Research, General Post Office (GPO) Box 1538, Hobart, Tasmania 7001, Australia. 2Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania, Private Bag 129, Hobart, Tasmania 7001, Australia. 3Wealth from Oceans National Research Flagship, CSIRO, GPO Box 1538, Hobart, Tasmania 7001, Australia. 4Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Mail Code L-103, 7000 East Avenue, Livermore, CA 94550, USA. To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: pauldurack en llnl.gov

Abstract
Fundamental thermodynamics and climate models suggest that dry regions will become drier and wet regions will become wetter in response to warming. Efforts to detect this long-term response in sparse surface observations of rainfall and evaporation remain ambiguous. We show that ocean salinity patterns express an identifiable fingerprint of an intensifying water cycle. Our 50-year observed global surface salinity changes, combined with changes from global climate models, present robust evidence of an intensified global water cycle at a rate of 8 ± 5% per degree of surface warming. This rate is double the response projected by current-generation climate models and suggests that a substantial (16 to 24%) intensification of the global water cycle will occur in a future 2° to 3° warmer world. 



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