Emission scenario dependencies in climate change assessments of the hydrological cycle

Anthropogenic global warming will lead to changes in the global hydrological cycle. The uncertainty in precipitation sensitivity per 1 K of global warming across coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation models (AOGCMs) has been actively examined. On the other hand, the uncertainty in precipitation sensitivity in different emission scenarios of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and aerosols has received little attention. Here we show a robust emission-scenario dependency (ESD); smaller global precipitation sensitivities occur in higher GHG and aerosol emission scenarios. Although previous studies have applied this ESD to the multi-AOGCM mean, our surprising finding is that current AOGCMs all have the common ESD in the same direction. Different aerosol emissions lead to this ESD. The implications of the ESD of precipitation sensitivity extend far beyond climate analyses. As we show, the ESD potentially propagates into considerable biases in impact assessments of the hydrological cycle via a widely used technique, so-called pattern scaling. Since pattern scaling is essential to conducting parallel analyses across climate, impact, adaptation and mitigation scenarios in the next report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, more attention should be paid to the ESD of precipitation sensitivity.     

A method for determination of volcanic glass concentrations in sedimentary sequences and its application to quaternary studies

A method for determination of volcanic glass concentration in sedimentary sequences is presented. This method consists of two steps: (1) systematic extraction of volcanic glass particles from samples taken at close intervals in a sedimentary section, and the determination of their concentration; (2) precise measurement of the refractive indices of the separated glass particles. A recently developed measuring system (RIMS 86) based on the thermal immersion method permits quick and accurate measurement of the refractive index of a large number of grains within samples. Based on these kinds of data, we typically recognize five types of concentration of volcanic glass shards in sedimentary sequences. The method proposed here enables the simultaneous determination of the refractive index of glass shards and the proportion of glass shards in a sample, which makes it possible to recognize certain ash-fall-horizons, even those undetectable through visual observation of a sedimentary column. © 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.