Effects of circulation on tropical cloud feedbacks in high-resolution simulations
Abstract
Uncertainty in the response of clouds to global warming remains a significant barrier to reducing uncertainty in climate sensitivity. A key question is the extent to which the dynamic component—that which is due to changes in circulation rather than changes in the thermodynamic properties of clouds—contributes to the total cloud feedback. Here, simulations with a range of cloud-resolving models are analyzed to quantify the impact of circulation changes on tropical cloud feedbacks. The dynamic component of the cloud feedback is substantial for some models and is controlled both by sea surface temperature (SST) induced changes in circulation and nonlinearity in the climatological relationship between clouds and circulation. We find notable inter-model differences in the extent to which ascending regions narrow or expand in response to a change in SST, which we link to differences in the longwave and shortwave dynamic components across models. The diversity of changes in ascent area is coupled to intermodel differences in non-radiative diabatic heating in ascending regions.
Citation
Mackie , A & Byrne , M P 2023 , ' Effects of circulation on tropical cloud feedbacks in high-resolution simulations ' , Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems , vol. 15 , no. 5 , e2022MS003516 . https://doi.org/10.1029/2022ms003516
Publication
Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1942-2466Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2023 The Authors. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Geophysical Union. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Description
Funding: Natural Environment Research Council. Grant Number: NE/T006269/1.Collections
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