Revisiting the historical wintertime drying of the Mediterranean in the LESFMIP simulations

Avisar, David; Garfinkel, Chaim I.

doi:10.5194/wcd-7-1331-2026

Articles | Volume 7, issue 3

https://doi.org/10.5194/wcd-7-1331-2026

© Author(s) 2026. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

Advances in annual to decadal prediction, projection, and...

https://doi.org/10.5194/wcd-7-1331-2026

© Author(s) 2026. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 7, issue 3

Research article

|

28 Jul 2026

Research article |

| 28 Jul 2026

Revisiting the historical wintertime drying of the Mediterranean in the LESFMIP simulations

David Avisar and Chaim I. Garfinkel

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Final revised paper (published on 28 Jul 2026)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 23 Sep 2025)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

RC1:
'Comment on egusphere-2025-4287', Anonymous Referee #1, 27 Oct 2025

Publisher’s note: a supplement was added to this comment on 3 November 2025.
Please see attached pdf.

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-4287-RC1
- AC1: 'Reply on RC1', David Avisar, 01 Jan 2026
  
  The comment was uploaded in the form of a supplement: https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2025/egusphere-2025-4287/egusphere-2025-4287-AC1-supplement.pdf
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-4287-AC1
RC2:
'Comment on egusphere-2025-4287', Osamu Miyawaki, 05 Dec 2025

This manuscript investigates the sources of inter- and intramodel spread in historical Mediterranean precipitation trends using LESFMIP simulations. The key analysis involves taking correlations of wintertime precipitation trends with those of various atmospheric dynamics metrics under greenhouse gas and aerosol forcings across all LESFMIP ensemble runs.
Understanding inter- and intramodel spread is important and I think this manuscript presents valuable results on what dynamics matter for understanding the sources of Mediterranean precipitation spread. However, I share the same concerns raised by reviewer 1, especially regarding how the current manuscript doesn't fully leverage the usefulness of LESFMIP simulations. It seems to me that separating the role of various forcings on the precipitation trend is not the main focus of this paper. There are brief discussions in passing about how the correlations between precipitation trend and various dynamics metrics differ among GHG and aerosol forcings but many of the differences remain unexplained. Thus the key results found here (sources of inter- and intramodel spread) could largely be done using regular SMILE ensembles (see e.g., Deser et al. 2020, Maher et al. 2023), which offers the advantage of having even more ensemble members than in LESFMIP.
As reviewer 1 points out, I agree the usefulness of the LESFMIP ensemble could be better leveraged by putting the model trends in the context of observations. Vicente-Serrano et al. (2025) argue observed Mediterranean precipitation trends are dominated by internal variability and are not a response to forcing. LESFMIP could provide more clarity behind the sensitivity of the trend to the choice of time period (e.g., opposing responses to GHG and aerosol forcing may lead to weaker total forced response during some time periods).
As a first step I suggest the authors either 1) align the choice of dataset with the current focus on understanding inter- and intramodel spread or 2) reframe their research question to better align with the usefulness of the LESFMIP dataset.
Deser, C., Lehner, F., Rodgers, K.B. et al. Insights from Earth system model initial-condition large ensembles and future prospects. Nat. Clim. Chang. 10, 277–286 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-0731-2
Maher, N., Wills, R. C. J., DiNezio, P., Klavans, J., Milinski, S., Sanchez, S. C., Stevenson, S., Stuecker, M. F., and Wu, X.: The future of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation: using large ensembles to illuminate time-varying responses and inter-model differences, Earth Syst. Dynam., 14, 413–431, https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-14-413-2023, 2023.
Vicente-Serrano, Sergio M., et al. "High temporal variability not trend dominates Mediterranean precipitation." Nature 639.8055 (2025): 658-666.

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-4287-RC2
- AC2: 'Reply on RC2', David Avisar, 01 Jan 2026
  
  The comment was uploaded in the form of a supplement: https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2025/egusphere-2025-4287/egusphere-2025-4287-AC2-supplement.pdf
  
  Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-4287-AC2

Peer review completion

AR – Author's response | RR – Referee report | ED – Editor decision | EF – Editorial file upload

AR by David Avisar on behalf of the Authors (09 Jan 2026) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (26 Jan 2026) by Yen-Ting Hwang

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (03 Feb 2026)

For final publication, the manuscript should be

accepted as is

accepted subject to technical corrections

accepted subject to minor revisions

reconsidered after major revisions

rejected

Were a revised manuscript to be sent for another round of reviews:

I would be willing to review the revised manuscript.

I would not be willing to review the revised manuscript.

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

In this manuscript, the authors investigated the contributions of GHG and AER to the Mediterranean drying with LESFMIP output. The authors have revised once and I joined in the second round. I read the whole manuscript and the authors response to earlier comments. However, the manuscript still needs substantial revisions before the acceptance of publication. My comments are listed below:

(1) The major issue with the current manuscript is that it is not focused, and many irrelevant contents are presented which may distract the logic flow of the manuscript. Half of the manuscript is discussing the inter-model spread of the precipitation response. If the inter-model spread is large, does that mean your results in the Figure 4 is not reliable? In the title, abstract and introduction section, the authors clearly say that this work is mainly focused on winter time precip change. But in the manuscript, the precip change in other seasons are presented. In addition, the relative contributions of each forcing agent are not fully summarized. The authors conclude that GHGs lead to a 15% reduction in precipitation and much of it is offset by aerosols. What are the contributions of other forcing agents, what is the total precipitation change, and to what extent, the aerosols counteracted the effect of GHGs?

(2) Only Figure 4 is focused on the main goal of the question. However, what is the mechanisms behind the drying due to GHGs or the offset of the aerosols. The authors analyzed several other indices, but did not clearly show the mechanisms. How does the 2m temperature (or warming hole), land-sea temperature contrast, zonal wind or polar vortex modify the precipitation over Mediterranean?

(3) A thorough literature review is needed. Some published work on this topic should be discussed and compared with your results (Silva et al., 2018; Tang et al., 2018; Westervelt et al., 2018; Wilcox et al., 2023). These papers, more or less mentioned the impact of aerosols on the precipitation over Mediterranean and some of them might be different from your results. Relative to these studies, what are the new insights you provide in your manuscript?

References
Da Silva, N., Mailler, S., and Drobinski, P.: Aerosol indirect effects on summer precipitation in a regional climate model for the Euro-Mediterranean region, Ann. Geophys., 36, 321–335, https://doi.org/10.5194/angeo-36-321-2018, 2018.

Tang, T., Shindell, D., Samset, B. H., Boucher, O., Forster, P. M., Hodnebrog, Ø., Myhre, G., Sillmann, J., Voulgarakis, A., Andrews, T., Faluvegi, G., Fläschner, D., Iversen, T., Kasoar, M., Kharin, V., Kirkevåg, A., Lamarque, J.-F., Olivié, D., Richardson, T., Stjern, C. W., and Takemura, T.: Dynamical response of Mediterranean precipitation to greenhouse gases and aerosols, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 18, 8439–8452, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-18-8439-2018, 2018.
Westervelt, D. M., Conley, A. J., Fiore, A. M., Lamarque, J.-F., Shindell, D. T., Previdi, M., Mascioli, N. R., Faluvegi, G., Correa, G., and Horowitz, L. W.: Connecting regional aerosol emissions reductions to local and remote precipitation responses, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 18, 12461–12475, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-18-12461-2018, 2018.
Wilcox, L. J., Allen, R. J., Samset, B. H., Bollasina, M. A., Griffiths, P. T., Keeble, J., Lund, M. T., Makkonen, R., Merikanto, J., O'Donnell, D., Paynter, D. J., Persad, G. G., Rumbold, S. T., Takemura, T., Tsigaridis, K., Undorf, S., and Westervelt, D. M.: The Regional Aerosol Model Intercomparison Project (RAMIP), Geosci. Model Dev., 16, 4451–4479, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-16-4451-2023, 2023.

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RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (14 Feb 2026)

For final publication, the manuscript should be

accepted as is

accepted subject to technical corrections

accepted subject to minor revisions

reconsidered after major revisions

rejected

Were a revised manuscript to be sent for another round of reviews:

I would be willing to review the revised manuscript.

I would not be willing to review the revised manuscript.

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The authors have significantly improved the manuscript. My previous comments have been mostly addressed and I only have a few suggestions for clarification.

1) In section 1, existing gaps in the literature are introduced. They are (A) insignificant observed trend despite robust future projection. (B) There is large uncertainty in the magnitude of future projection, and it is unclear whether the uncertainty is coming from structural uncertainty or internal variability.

The authors nicely address (A) by examining multimodel-mean responses of hist-GHG and hist-aer simulations. Authors now show that LESFMIP simulations capture the observed change, so this is well addressed.

(B) is not perfectly addressed by using LESFMIP. LESFMIP is a historical forcing simulation. There are limitations in addressing the uncertainties of future projections. If (B) is what motivated authors, the limitation of LESFMIP as a tool to investigate (B) has to be mentioned in the introduction, along with why LESFMIP is limited but still a useful tool.

2) Dynamical mechanisms can be elaborated.
For the climate indices that were found to be significantly impactful for the multimodel spread, the dynamical mechanism connecting these indices and mediterranean responses has to be better described. For exmaple, how does North Atlantic warming hole lead to ridging? "mechanistically linked" is not sufficient. Similar for polar vortex and North Atlantic jet metrics.

3) This is a minor point of the paper, but I think the dynamic sensitivity context is confusing around 279.
In Grise and Polvani, dynamic sensitivity not being climate sensitivity means that circulation resposnes are not correlated with surface warming across models. What is being emphasized there is whether the circulation responses can be constrained if one constrains climate sensitivity.

But what authors find is a significant correlation between a circulation variable and global surface warming. In this case, if one constrains climate sensitivity, they can constrain circulation response. Therefore, it is confusing to mention Grise and Polvani in this context.

I understand the authors are pointing to that the multimodel mean response is ridging with warming, but the cross-model relationship is troughing with warming. I agree that this itself is interesting, and bringing this up more straighforwardly is a good idea. (For those who don't know what to naively expect there) However, the emphasis of Grise and Polvani is on the cross-model relationship. Hence, how it is described in the manuscript is confusing.

4) Visualization suggestion
The aspect ratio of the scatter plots does not help figure out which correlations are strong or weak. Both appear very flat from the current aspect ratio of the panels. I think making the panels closer to a 1:1 ratio would help the readers. But this is not scientific, hence totally up to the authors to choose.

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ED: Publish subject to revisions (further review by editor and referees) (24 Mar 2026) by Yen-Ting Hwang

AR by David Avisar on behalf of the Authors (30 Apr 2026) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (24 May 2026) by Yen-Ting Hwang

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (25 May 2026)

ED: Publish as is (12 Jul 2026) by Yen-Ting Hwang

AR by David Avisar on behalf of the Authors (14 Jul 2026)

Short summary

We use the Large Ensemble Single Forcing simulations to assess the role of individual forcings to the Mediterranean drying and to clarify the dynamical origin of the model’s prediction variability. A more pronounced North Atlantic warming hole, a stronger stratospheric polar vortex, and a larger poleward shift of the subtropical jet correlate with a stronger drying trend. Aerosols had a detectable influence on Mediterranean climate. Hence, their removal may have an impact in future decades.