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Cloud radiative forcing of subtropical low level clouds in global models

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Abstract

Simulations of subtropical marine low clouds and their radiative properties by nine coupled ocean-atmosphere climate models participating in the fourth assesment report (AR4) of the intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) are analyzed. Satellite observations of cloudiness and radiative fluxes at the top of the atmosphere (TOA) are utilized for comparison. The analysis is confined to the marine subtropics in an attempt to isolate low cloudiness from tropical convective systems. All analyzed models have a negative bias in the low cloud fraction (model mean bias of  −15%). On the other hand, the models show an excess of cloud radiative cooling in the region (model mean excess of 13 W m−2). The latter bias is shown to mainly originate from too much shortwave reflection by the models clouds rather than biases in the clear-sky fluxes. These results confirm earlier studies, thus no major progress in simulating the marine subtropical clouds is noted. As a consequence of the combination of these two biases, this study suggests that all investigated models are likely to overestimate the radiative response to changes in low level subtropical cloudiness.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks go to Frida Bender for good discussions and critical comments. The ERBE-data were obtained from the NASA Langley Research Center Atmospheric Sciences Data Center. The climatological monthly mean ISCCP D2 data were obtained from the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project web site http://isccp.giss.nasa.gov maintained by the ISCCP research group at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, NY on March, 2005. ICOADS data provided by the NOAA-CIRES Climate Diagnostics Center, Boulder, Colorado, USA, from their Web site at http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/. We acknowledge the international modeling groups for providing their data for analysis, the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI) for collecting and archiving the model data, the JSC/CLIVAR Working Group on Coupled Modelling (WGCM) and their Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) and Climate Simulation Panel for organizing the model data analysis activity, and the IPCC WG1 TSU for technical support. The IPCC Data Archive at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy.

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  1. Department of Meteorology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

    Johannes Karlsson, Gunilla Svensson & Henning Rodhe

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  1. Johannes Karlsson
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Correspondence to Johannes Karlsson.

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Karlsson, J., Svensson, G. & Rodhe, H. Cloud radiative forcing of subtropical low level clouds in global models. Clim Dyn 30, 779–788 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-007-0322-1

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