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Effects of Climate System Feedbacks and Inertia on Surface Temperature Power Spectrum Obtained from CMIP5 and Low-Order Models

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Abstract

The current climate change is characterized by both long-term trends caused mainly by human activities and periodic and aperiodic variability caused by natural factors, which are not completely understood. Understanding the processes, that control climate change and variability, is essential from both theoretical and practical points of view. This paper aims at studying the effect of uncertainties in radiative feedbacks and climate system inertia on power spectrum of the global mean surface temperature (GMST) fluctuations. Randomly forced two-box energy balance model (EBM) is used as a main tool of this study. Sensitivity analysis is applied to determine how uncertainties in feedback and climate system inertia affect the power spectrum using the EBM. It was shown that in the high-frequency range of the power spectrum of GMST fluctuations, the influence of climate system inertia is more significant than the influence of feedbacks. In the low-frequency range, on the contrary, the influence of feedbacks on power spectrum exceeds the influence of climate inertia. Our confidence in the results obtained is based on the satisfactory agreement between the theoretical power spectrum derived from the EBM and the power spectrum obtained from observations and coupled climate models, including historical runs of the CMIP5 models.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. St. Petersburg Federal Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 199178, St. Petersburg, Russia

    S. Soldatenko

  2. Australian Bureau of Meteorology, 3008, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Robert Colman

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  1. S. Soldatenko
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  2. Robert Colman
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Correspondence to S. Soldatenko or Robert Colman.

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Soldatenko, S., Colman, R. Effects of Climate System Feedbacks and Inertia on Surface Temperature Power Spectrum Obtained from CMIP5 and Low-Order Models. Izv. Atmos. Ocean. Phys. 57, 659–668 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1134/S0001433821200044

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1134/S0001433821200044

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