Seasonally variant low cloud adjustment over cool oceans

Climate Dynamics volume 52, pages5801–5817(2019)Cite this article

Abstract

The Earth’s solar reflectance is reduced through rapid climate adjustments to increasing CO2, via a decrease in total cloud cover over ocean. Perturbations to marine boundary-layer clouds are essentially important for the global radiative balance at the top of the atmosphere. However, the physical robustness of low cloud adjustments to increasing CO2 has not been assessed systematically. Here we show that low cloud adjustment is distinct from that in total cloud and is seasonally variant. Among multiple climate models, marine boundary-layer clouds over the subtropics and extratropics (especially over the Northern Hemisphere) are consistently increased in the rapid adjustment, while middle and high clouds are greatly reduced. The increase in low cloud cover is only found during summer, associated with a summertime enhancement of lower tropospheric stability. We further examine mechanisms behind the rapid adjustments of low cloud and inversion strength of the boundary layer, using land surface temperature prescribing experiments in an atmospheric general circulation model (AGCM). Summertime increases in low cloud and enhanced inversion strength over the ocean simulated in this AGCM are attributed to (1) CO2-induced land warming; and (2) reduced radiative cooling in the lower troposphere due to increased CO2. The seasonality in the cloud adjustment implies an importance of seasonal variations in background cloud and atmospheric circulation related to the Hadley and monsoon circulations for radiative forcing, feedback and climate sensitivity.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme’s Working Group on Coupled Modeling, which is responsible for CMIP, and we thank the climate modeling groups (listed in Table S1 in the online supplement) for producing and making available their model output. For CMIP5, the US Department of Energy’s Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison provided coordinating support, and led the development of the software infrastructure in partnership with the Global Organization for Earth System Science Portals. This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers 17K14388 and 17K05657, and the Integrated Research Program for Advancing Climate Models (TOUGOU program) from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), Japan. The authors are grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. We would like to acknowledge M. Watanabe and H. Shiogama for helpful discussions.

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Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Tsukuba, 1-1-1 Tennoudai, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, 305-8572, Japan

    Youichi Kamae

  2. Met Office Hadley Centre, Exeter, Devon, UK

    Robin Chadwick & Mark Ringer

  3. Met Office, Exeter, Devon, UK

    Duncan Ackerley

  4. National Institute for Environmental Studies, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan

    Tomoo Ogura

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  1. Youichi Kamae
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  2. Robin Chadwick
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  3. Duncan Ackerley
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  5. Tomoo Ogura
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Correspondence to Youichi Kamae.

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Kamae, Y., Chadwick, R., Ackerley, D. et al. Seasonally variant low cloud adjustment over cool oceans. Clim Dyn 52, 5801–5817 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-018-4478-7

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Keywords

  • Cloud adjustment
  • Instantaneous radiative forcing
  • Inversion strength
  • Low cloud