Relation Between Arctic Moisture Flux and Tropical Temperature Biases in CMIP5 Simulations and Its Fingerprint in RCP8.5 Projections

Arctic moisture intrusions have played an important role in warming the Arctic over the past few decades. A prior study found that Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) models exhibit large regional biases in the moisture flux across 70°N. It is shown here that the systematic misrepresentation of the moisture flux is related to the models' overprediction of zonal wavenumber k = 2 contribution and underprediction of k = 1...