Strong contribution from sensible heat to global precipitation increase in climate models is not supported by observational based data

Abstract

It has previously been shown that trends in sensible heat from climate models have had a substantial contribution to global precipitation changes. We illustrate that this is the case also in the most recent Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6). However, we find that over the period since 1980 reanalyses do not support the reduction in sensible heat from the CMIP6 models and rather estimate a global increase in sensible heat which would contribute to a precipitation reduction. Satellite data over a period of two decades over global ocean generally show an opposite sign of the sensible heat trend to the CMIP6 models, similarly to the reanalyses.