Adjustments in the Forcing-Feedback Framework for Understanding Climate Change

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Constraints on future changes in climate and the hydrologic cycle.

Myles Allen, William J. Ingram (2002)

What can we say about changes in the hydrologic cycle on 50-year timescales when we cannot predict rainfall next week? Eventually, perhaps, a great deal: the overall climate response to increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases may prove much simpler and more predictable than the chaos of short-term weather. Quantifying the diversity of possible responses is essential for any objective, probability-based climate forecast, and this task will require a new generation of climate modelling experiments, systematically exploring the range of model behaviour that is consistent with observations. It will be substantially harder to quantify the range of possible changes in the hydrologic cycle than in global-mean temperature, both because the observations are less complete and because the physical constraints are weaker.

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Atmospheric brown clouds: impacts on South Asian climate and hydrological cycle.

V. Ramanathan, C. Chung, D. Kim … (2005)

South Asian emissions of fossil fuel SO(2) and black carbon increased approximately 6-fold since 1930, resulting in large atmospheric concentrations of black carbon and other aerosols. This period also witnessed strong negative trends of surface solar radiation, surface evaporation, and summer monsoon rainfall. These changes over India were accompanied by an increase in atmospheric stability and a decrease in sea surface temperature gradients in the Northern Indian Ocean. We conducted an ensemble of coupled ocean-atmosphere simulations from 1930 to 2000 to understand the role of atmospheric brown clouds in the observed trends. The simulations adopt the aerosol radiative forcing from the Indian Ocean experiment observations and also account for global increases in greenhouse gases and sulfate aerosols. The simulated decreases in surface solar radiation, changes in surface and atmospheric temperatures over land and sea, and decreases in monsoon rainfall are similar to the observed trends. We also show that greenhouse gases and sulfates, by themselves, do not account for the magnitude or even the sign in many instances, of the observed trends. Thus, our simulations suggest that absorbing aerosols in atmospheric brown clouds may have played a major role in the observed regional climate and hydrological cycle changes and have masked as much as 50% of the surface warming due to the global increase in greenhouse gases. The simulations also raise the possibility that, if current trends in emissions continue, the subcontinent may experience a doubling of the drought frequency in the coming decades.

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Impact of changes in diffuse radiation on the global land carbon sink.

Lina M. Mercado, Nicolas Bellouin, Stephen Sitch … (2009)

Plant photosynthesis tends to increase with irradiance. However, recent theoretical and observational studies have demonstrated that photosynthesis is also more efficient under diffuse light conditions. Changes in cloud cover or atmospheric aerosol loadings, arising from either volcanic or anthropogenic emissions, alter both the total photosynthetically active radiation reaching the surface and the fraction of this radiation that is diffuse, with uncertain overall effects on global plant productivity and the land carbon sink. Here we estimate the impact of variations in diffuse fraction on the land carbon sink using a global model modified to account for the effects of variations in both direct and diffuse radiation on canopy photosynthesis. We estimate that variations in diffuse fraction, associated largely with the 'global dimming' period, enhanced the land carbon sink by approximately one-quarter between 1960 and 1999. However, under a climate mitigation scenario for the twenty-first century in which sulphate aerosols decline before atmospheric CO(2) is stabilized, this 'diffuse-radiation' fertilization effect declines rapidly to near zero by the end of the twenty-first century.

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Title: Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society

Abbreviated Title: Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc.

Publisher: American Meteorological Society

ISSN (Print): 0003-0007

ISSN (Electronic): 1520-0477

Publication date Created: February 2015

Publication date (Print): February 2015

Volume: 96

Issue: 2

Pages: 217-228

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DOI: 10.1175/BAMS-D-13-00167.1

SO-VID: 2f454180-2332-4b76-b301-a0198c67ba5d

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Adjustments in the Forcing-Feedback Framework for Understanding Climate Change

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UCL Grand Challenges: Cultural Understanding

Most cited references 46

Constraints on future changes in climate and the hydrologic cycle.

Atmospheric brown clouds: impacts on South Asian climate and hydrological cycle.

Impact of changes in diffuse radiation on the global land carbon sink.

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