Combined Effects of Global Warming and Ozone Depletion/Recovery on Southern Hemisphere Atmospheric Circulation and Regional Precipitation

Key Points

  1. Long-term changes in the delay of the breakdown of the Southern Hemisphere stratospheric polar vortex can be largely explained by a linear response to ozone-depleting substances and to global warming
  2. The tug-of-war between ozone recovery and global warming manifests itself in the stratospheric vortex breakdown delay and propagates to the troposphere
  3. The uncertainty in future changes in regional precipitation in the Southern Hemisphere is subject to the combined effects of the uncertainty in tropical warming and in the vortex breakdown delay

This is a Figure

Each panel shows the ensemble mean VB date change with respect to the 1950-1969 climatology for an individual model (blue), the contributions of EESC and GW to VB delay, estimated for each model with the linear regression model (Eq. 1), and the total linear fit (red).

Mindlin, J., Shepherd, T. G., Vera, C. and Osman, M. (2021) Combined effects of global warming and ozone depletion/recovery on Southern Hemisphere atmospheric circulation and regional precipitation. Geophysical Research Letters. e2021GL092568. ISSN 0094-8276 doi: https://doi.org/10.1029/2021GL092568 (In Press)