de Viron, O., H. Goosse, M. Crucifix, V. Dehant, and participating CMIP modeling groups, 2001:
Effect of global warming on the length-of-day
Abstracts of the Fall 2001 Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), 10-14 December 2001, San Francisco, California USA.Abstract
The anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas concentrations in the Earth atmosphere will probably induce imporatant modifications of the global circulation in the atmosphere and ocean. Due to the angular momentum conservation of the Earth-atmosphere-ocean system, variation of the Earth rotation rate (and the length-of-day (lod) can be expected. By using the outputs of the models participating in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP 2), we reach the following conclusions: (1) the different models globally predict an increase of the lod of the order of 1 microsecond/year, (2) the effect is mostly associated with an increase of the wind term of the axial atmospheric angular momentum, compensated about one third by the inverted barometer matter term.