What are the regional expressions of climate change?

Over the last decades and years, the question of climate change attribution has been resolved scientifically and we have made good progress in constraining the magnitude of greenhouse warming at a global scale. In contrast, the regional expression of climate change is still poorly understood, hence providing a vague physical basis for foresighted political decisions and socioeconomic planning.

Gaps to fill in our knowledge on regional climate relate to regional trends and magnitudes of monsoon precipitation, drought in subtropical regions of both hemispheres, Arctic warming (including melt of sea ice and Greenland ice), prevalent climate modes and seasonality in mid-latitude regions, etc.

Focused research over the next decade should be able to constrain many of the uncertainties about the regionally relevant aspects of climate change. Such research needs to address regional climate dynamics across past and present timescales, based on targeted, high-resolution climate modeling and the generation and analysis of detailed paleo-climate reconstructions and climate-observation datasets. Without better-founded expectations about regional changes, any research on global change impacts and adaptation measures will be built on sand and remain speculative.