Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Andrews, Timothy
• Forster, Piers M.
• Boucher, Olivier
• Bellouin, Nicolas
• Jones, Andy

Titel

Precipitation, radiative forcing and global temperature change

Ist Teil von

• Geophysical research letters, 2010-07, Vol.37 (14), p.n/a

Ort / Verlag

Washington, DC: Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2010

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• 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.