Precipitation, radiative forcing and global temperature change

Andrews, T., Forster, P. M., Boucher, O., Bellouin, N. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2109-9559 and Jones, A. (2010) Precipitation, radiative forcing and global temperature change. Geophysical Research Letters, 37 (14). L14701. ISSN 0094-8276 doi: 10.1029/2010GL043991

Abstract/Summary

Radiative forcing is a useful tool for predicting equilibrium global temperature change. However, it is not so useful for predicting global precipitation changes, as changes in precipitation strongly depend on the climate change mechanism and how it perturbs the atmospheric and surface energy budgets. Here a suite of climate model experiments and radiative transfer calculations are used to quantify and assess this dependency across a range of climate change mechanisms. It is shown that the precipitation response can be split into two parts: a fast atmospheric response that strongly correlates with the atmospheric component of radiative forcing, and a slower response to global surface temperature change that is independent of the climate change mechanism, ∼2-3% per unit of global surface temperature change. We highlight the precipitation response to black carbon aerosol forcing as falling within this range despite having an equilibrium response that is of opposite sign to the radiative forcing and global temperature change.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/30591
Identification Number/DOI	10.1029/2010GL043991
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > Department of Meteorology
Publisher	American Geophysical Union
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