Abstract
Tropical rainfall plays a central role in the climate system, shaping ecosystems and societies. Here we show that recent tropical rainfall changes are primarily driven by spatial shifts in atmospheric circulation rather than thermodynamic processes, and cannot be explained by the “Wet Get Wetter” or “Warm Get Wetter” paradigms. Observations reveal a northward shift in precipitation with wetting in the western and northern equatorial Pacific, northern Indian region, and drying south of the equator in the Pacific and South America. These trends coincide with a La Niña-like sea surface temperature pattern, strengthened Walker circulation, Southern Ocean cooling, enhanced land-sea and inter-hemispheric thermal gradients, and intensification of the Indo-Pacific warm pool. Climate models largely miss the first three features, projecting instead a reduced equatorial Pacific sea surface temperature gradient, but capture large-scale thermal gradients and Indo-Pacific warm pool changes. We show that amplified land-sea thermal contrast and Indo-Pacific warm pool intensification reproduce the observed circulation and rainfall changes. Coupled sensitivity experiments further confirm that land warming and ongoing desertification in the Northern Hemisphere act as active drivers of current tropical hydroclimate changes, challenging ocean-centric assumptions in current climate models.
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Data availability
The ERA5 data set used in this study is available to download from https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/76. The CMIP6 data is available to download from https://digital.csic.es/handle/10261/33274491. The CFS model is available to download from https://cfs.ncep.noaa.gov/cfsv2/downloads.htmland the SINTEX model is available at https://forge-web.ipsl.upmc.fr/sinext/browser/trunk. The processed climate model sensitivity experiment data and the data used to generate the figures are available at https://github.com/ligin1/Tropical-Precipitation-Response-to-Anthropogenic-Climate-Change-in-Recent-Decades92.
Code availability
Figures shown in this study are plotted using Python (https://www.python.org/). The Python code used for the analyses in this study is available at https://github.com/ligin1/Tropical-Precipitation-Response-to-Anthropogenic-Climate-Change-in-Recent-Decades92.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Natural Environment Research Council [Grant NE/S007210/1]. Pascal Terray is funded by Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD, France). K.P. Sooraj is funded by the CCCR and IITM, which are fully funded by the Ministry of Earth Sciences, Government of India. This project was provided with computing HPC and storage resources by GENCI at TGCC (France), thanks to the grants 2024-A0170113051 and 2025-A0190113051 on the supercomputer Joliot Curie’s SKL and ROME partitions. This work was also supported by a French government grant managed by the ’Agence Nationale de la Recherche’ under the ’investissements d’avenir’ program (reference “ANR-21-ESRE-0051"). It was granted access to the MesoNET resources center and the MesoNET project under the allocation m24050. K.P. Sooraj sincerely thank the Director, IITM, for support during the research study. The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support given by the Earth System Science Organization, Ministry of Earth Sciences, Government of India, to conduct parts of this research under the National Monsoon Mission (Grant number: MM/SERP/ CNRS/2013/INT-10/002, Contribution number: MM/PASCAL/RP/08). The authors gratefully acknowledge Lijo Abraham Joseph for his valuable feedback on improving figure quality and orientation, as well as for his help in correcting errors in the Python code used for analysis and figure production.
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L.J.: Conceptualization, Formal Analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing - original draft; P.T.: Conceptualization, Formal Analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Resources, Software, Supervision, Writing - original draft, Writing - review and editing; K.S.: Resources, Writing - review and editing; S.M.: Resources, Writing - review and editing.
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Joseph, L., Terray, P., Sooraj, K.P. et al. Tropical precipitation response to anthropogenic climate change in recent decades. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-71187-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-71187-4
