Future Change in the Moist Wave Activity and Its Potential Impact on Local Extreme Precipitation Under a Warming Climate

Abstract The framework of local wave activity is adapted to the column‐integrated water vapor in North Hemisphere to investigate the regional difference, seasonal variation, and future change in atmospheric moist wave activity () and its sink () in CMIP5 simulations. Analyses indicate the and are mainly located at marine (mid‐latitude) regions with large values over monsoon (coastal) areas in summer (winter). Meanwhile, the participating in the hydrological cycle () is linearly related to the dissipation by that is highly correlated to the local precipitation extremes in both seasons. This proves that the underlying reasons for the future changes are favorable for understanding the variability of local extreme precipitation. Under the RCP8.5 scenario, the hemispherical increases of reflect a pattern enhancement up to 28% (20%) in summer (winter), leading to the sensitivity around 6.8%/°C and 4.5%/°C within the given surface warming (∼4°C and ∼4.5°C) in summer and winter. Further inspections illustrate that the increased anomalies of stationary accounts for the majority of the total changes in terms of spatial features and climate sensitivity under global warming. Moreover, the stirring scale and background moisture gradient, regarded as the dynamic and thermodynamic factors, both have positive contributions (+4.1%/°C and +5.9%/°C) to the high sensitivity in summer. Nonetheless, the lower sensitivity in winter could be attributed to the distinct contributions of dynamic (−0.04%/°C) and thermodynamic (+6.1%/°C) effects. Lastly, the strong model agreement in 16 CMIP5 models offers confidence that the increased stationary likely leads to more local precipitation extremes in a warming climate.