TS.6.2 Observations of Changes in Climate

TS.6.2.1 Atmosphere and Surface

Robust Findings:

Global mean surface temperatures continue to rise. Eleven of the last 12 years rank among the 12 warmest years on record since 1850. {3.2}

Rates of surface warming increased in the mid-1970s and the global land surface has been warming at about double the rate of ocean surface warming since then. {3.2}

Changes in surface temperature extremes are consistent with warming of the climate. {3.8}

Estimates of mid- and lower-tropospheric temperature trends have substantially improved. Lower-tropospheric temperatures have slightly greater warming rates than the surface from 1958 to 2005. {3.4}

Long-term trends from 1900 to 2005 have been observed in precipitation amount in many large regions. {3.3}

Increases have occurred in the number of heavy precipitation events. {3.8}

Droughts have become more common, especially in the tropics and subtropics, since the 1970s. {3.3}

Tropospheric water vapour has increased, at least since the 1980s. {3.4}

Key Uncertainties:

Radiosonde records are much less complete spatially than surface records and evidence suggests a number of radiosonde records are unreliable, especially in the tropics. It is likely that all records of tropospheric temperature trends still contain residual errors. {3.4}

While changes in large-scale atmospheric circulation are apparent, the quality of analyses is best only after 1979, making analysis of, and discrimination between, change and variability difficult. {3.5, 3.6}

Surface and satellite observations disagree on total and low-level cloud changes over the ocean. {3.4}

Multi-decadal changes in DTR are not well understood, in part because of limited observations of changes in cloudiness and aerosols. {3.2}

Difficulties in the measurement of precipitation remain an area of concern in quantifying trends in global and regional precipitation. {3.3}

Records of soil moisture and streamflow are often very short, and are available for only a few regions, which impedes complete analyses of changes in droughts. {3.3}

The availability of observational data restricts the types of extremes that can be analysed. The rarer the event, the more difficult it is to identify long-term changes because there are fewer cases available. {3.8}

Information on hurricane frequency and intensity is limited prior to the satellite era. There are questions about the interpretation of the satellite record. {3.8}

There is insufficient evidence to determine whether trends exist in tornadoes, hail, lightning and dust storms at small spatial scales. {3.8}