摘要：Climate models project large changes in global surface temperature in coming decades that
are expected to be accompanied by significant changes in the global hydrological cycle.
Validation of model simulations is essential to support their use in decision making, but
observing the elements of the hydrological cycle is challenging, and model-independent
global data sets exist only for precipitation. We compute the sensitivity of the global
hydrological cycle to changes in surface temperature using available global precipitation
data sets and compare the results against the sensitivities derived from model simulations
of 20th century climate. The implications of the results for the global climate observing
system are discussed.
