Constrained CMIP6 projections indicate less warming and a slower increase in water availability across Asia.

Abstract

Climate projections are essential for decision-making but contain non-negligible uncertainty. To reduce projection uncertainty over Asia, where half the world's population resides, we develop emergent constraint relationships between simulated temperature (1970-2014) and precipitation (2015-2100) growth rates using 27 CMIP6 models under four Shared Socioeconomic Pathways. Here we show that, with uncertainty successfully narrowed by 12.1-31.0%, constrained future precipitation growth rates are 0.39 ± 0.18 mm year^-1 (29.36 mm °C^-1, SSP126), 0.70 ± 0.22 mm year^-1 (20.03 mm °C^-1, SSP245), 1.10 ± 0.33 mm year^-1 (17.96 mm °C^-1, SSP370) and 1.42 ± 0.35 mm year^-1 (17.28 mm °C^-1, SSP585), indicating overestimates of 6.0-14.0% by the raw CMIP6 models. Accordingly, future temperature and total evaporation growth rates are also overestimated by 3.4-11.6% and -2.1-13.0%, respectively. The slower warming implies a lower snow cover loss rate by 10.5-40.2%. Overall, we find the projected increase in future water availability is overestimated by CMIP6 over Asia.