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Atmospheric circulation to constrain subtropical precipitation projections

Nature Climate Change volume 15, pages 287–292 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Accurately assessing future precipitation changes presents one of the greatest challenges of climate change. In the tropics, changes in the Hadley circulation are expected to considerably affect precipitation in dry subtropical and wet equatorial regions. However, while climate models project a robust weakening of the Northern Hemisphere circulation in the coming decades, currently, there is low confidence in the magnitude of such weakening and its impact on regional precipitation patterns. Here we use emergent constraint analyses and observation-based Hadley circulation strength changes to show that the projected circulation weakening will probably be larger than in current predictions. The more pronounced weakening of the flow results in a doubling of the subtropical precipitation increase compared with current forecasts, specifically over Asia, Africa and the Pacific Ocean. Our findings provide more accurate tropical circulation and precipitation projections and have considerable societal impacts, given the scarcity of water in subtropical regions.

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Fig. 1: Constraining future Hadley circulation strength changes.
Fig. 2: Constraining future subtropical precipitation changes.
Fig. 3: Constraining regional subtropical precipitation changes.
Fig. 4: The source for the larger Hadley circulation weakening.

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Data availability

The data used in the manuscript are publicly available: CMIP6 data at https://esgf-node.llnl.gov/projects/cmip6/ and CMIP5 data at https://esgf-node.llnl.gov/projects/cmip5/.

Code availability

Codes used to calculate the meridional mass streamfunction and meridional gradient are available on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7529584 (ref. 47), and the KE equation at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6434337 (ref. 48).

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Acknowledgements

R.C. acknowledges support from the Willner Family Leadership Institute for the Weizmann Institute of Science and the Zuckerman STEM Leadership Program.

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Rei Chemke, Janni Yuval.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel

    Rei Chemke

  2. Google Research, Mountain View, CA, USA

    Janni Yuval

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Contributions

R.C. and J.Y. equally contributed to this work. R.C. analysed the data and together with J.Y. discussed and wrote the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rei Chemke.

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Nature Climate Change thanks Minghua Zhang and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Zonal mean projected precipitation changes.

The future changes in zonal mean precipitation (ΔP, black) and the relative contribution from changes in evaporation (ΔE, gray), mean moisture (vΔq, purple), mean circulation (qΔv, red) and eddy moisture flux (\(\Delta {v}^{{\prime} }{q}^{{\prime} }\), blue) as a function of latitude. The solid lines show the CMIP6 mean and shadings the ± standard deviation across models.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Constraining future Hadley circulation strength changes.

Emergent constraints for the projected a, Hadley cell strength (as in Fig. 1 in the main text) and b, subtropical precipitation (as in Fig. 2b in the main text) under the SSP3-7.0 scenario. The standard deviation across the models is used for the uncertainty in the regression coefficients.

Extended Data Fig. 3 The lack of an emergent constraint in large ensembles.

The future changes in the Northern Hemisphere Hadley circulation strength (ΔΨmax) plotted against the 1960-2014 trends in Ψmax across the different members in a, ACCESS-ESM5, b, CanESM5, c, MIROC6 and d, MPI-ESM1-LR. The correlations appear in the upper left corners.

Extended Data Fig. 4 Linking future Hadley circulation strength changes.

The correlation coefficient across CMIP6 models of future changes in the Northern Hemisphere Hadley circulation strength (ΔΨmax) and 55-year trends in Ψmax starting at different years.

Extended Data Fig. 5 The role of internal variability.

a, The future changes in the Northern Hemisphere Hadley circulation strength (ΔΨmax) plotted against the 1960-2014 trends in Ψmax across CMIP6 models (blue dots). Blue line shows the linear regression. The green, black and purple lines respectively show the mean ΔΨmax in models, the observation-based 1960-2014 trend in Ψmax and the constrained ΔΨmax. The gray shading around the observation-based trend shows possible variations in the Hadley cell trend that arise from variations in the trend’s position within the models’ trend distribution (Methods). Purple shading around the constrained ΔΨmax shows the resulting uncertainty in the constrained ΔΨmax. b, The probability distributions of the observation-based 1960-2014 trend in Northern Hemisphere Ψmax (black) and of the 55-year Ψmax trends from preindustrial control runs, centered around the mean observation-based trend.

Extended Data Fig. 6 Constraining precipitation with historic flow trends.

The future changes (upper row) and 1960-2014 trends (bottom row) in zonal mean subtropical precipitation plotted against the 1960-2014 trends in a, d, Hadley circulation strength (Ψmax), b, e, sea-level pressure proxy (PSLy) and c, f, dynamically induced precipitation changes (qΔv) across CMIP6 models (blue dots). Blue lines show the linear regression and shadings the ± two standard deviations of the linear regressions (Methods). The black, purple and red lines respectively show the probability distributions of the observations, ΔP across models, and the constrained ΔP.

Extended Data Fig. 7 Projected precipitation changes.

The future changes in surface precipitation (mm day−1) in CMIP6 mean. Stippling shows regions where at least two thirds of the models agree on the sign of change. Gray rectangles show the areas of the regional analysis.

Extended Data Fig. 8 Subtropical precipitation changes.

The future changes in subtropical precipitation (ΔPsubtropics, averaged over 15° − 30°N) plotted against the 1960-2014 trends in subtropical precipitation across CMIP6 models; their correlation appears in the upper left corner.

Extended Data Fig. 9 Future subtropical precipitation and circulation changes in CMIP5 models.

The future changes in Northern Hemisphere subtropical precipitation (ΔPsubtropics) plotted against the future changes in the Hadley circulation strength across CMIP5 models (blue dots); their correlation appears in the upper right corner. Blue line shows the linear regression and shading the ± two standard deviations of the linear regressions (Methods). The standard deviation across the models is used for the uncertainty in the regression coefficients.

Extended Data Fig. 10 Hadley circulation strength changes in CMIP5.

a, The future changes in the Hadley circulation strength (ΔΨmax) plotted against the 1980-2034 trends in Ψmax across CMIP5 (blue dots) and CMIP6 (red dots) models; their correlations appear in the lower right corner. The blue and red lines show the linear regression in CMIP5 and CMIP6 models, respectively. b, The evolution of the Hadley cell strength (Ψmax) in the CMIP5 (blue line) and CMIP6 (red line) means.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–8 and Tables 1 and 2.

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Chemke, R., Yuval, J. Atmospheric circulation to constrain subtropical precipitation projections. Nat. Clim. Chang. 15, 287–292 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02266-5

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