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Uncertainty in CMIP6 climate change projections for the Australian monsoon is tied to hemispheric-scale changes
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  • Sugata Narsey,
  • Josephine R. Brown,
  • Robert A. Colman,
  • Francois Delage,
  • Scott Brendan Power,
  • Aurel F. Moise,
  • Huqiang Zhang
Sugata Narsey
Australian Bureau of Meteorology

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Josephine R. Brown
University of Melbourne
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Robert A. Colman
Bureau of Meteorology (Australia)
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Francois Delage
Bureau of Meteorology (Australia)
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Scott Brendan Power
Bureau of Meteorology (Australia)
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Aurel F. Moise
Bureau of Meteorology (Australia)
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Huqiang Zhang
Bureau of Meteorology
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Abstract

Climate change projections for the Australian monsoon have been highly uncertain in previous generations of coupled climate models. The new Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) ensemble provides an opportunity to address the uncertainty in future projections for northern Australia. We find that the range in Australian monsoon projections from the available CMIP6 ensemble is substantially reduced compared to CMIP5, although models continue to disagree on the magnitude and direction of change. While previous CMIP5 studies identified warming in the western equatorial Pacific as important for Australian monsoon projections, here we show that the western Pacific is not strongly connected to northern Australian precipitation changes in the CMIP6 models. By comparing groups of models based on their future projections, we note that the model-to-model differences in Australian monsoon projections are congruent with the zonally averaged precipitation response in the Southern Hemisphere tropics within each model.