Twentieth century climate model response and climate sensitivity

Twentieth century climate model response and climate sensitivity

[1] Climate forcing and climate sensitivity are two key factors in understanding Earth’s climate. There is considerable interest in decreasing our uncertainty in climate sensitivity. This study explores the role of these two factors in climate simulations of the 20th century. It is found that the total anthropogenic forcing for a wide range of climate models differs by a factor of two and that ...

The CLIVAR C20C project: selected twentieth century climate events

We use a simple methodology to test whether a set of atmospheric climate models with prescribed radiative forcings and ocean surface conditions can reproduce twentieth century climate variability. Globally, rapid land surface warming since the 1970s is reproduced by some models but others warm too slowly. In the tropics, air-sea coupling allows models to reproduce the Southern Oscillation but i...

Solar and Greenhouse Gas Forcing and Climate Response in the Twentieth Century

Ensemble experiments with a global coupled climate model are performed for the twentieth century with time-evolving solar, greenhouse gas, sulfate aerosol (direct effect), and ozone (tropospheric and stratospheric) forcing. Observed global warming in the twentieth century occurred in two periods, one in the early twentieth century from about the early 1900s to the 1940s, and one later in the ce...

Summary of the Climate Dialogue on Climate Sensitivity and Transient Climate Response

2 Introduction Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) is a central theme in climate science, as it characterizes the degree of temperature change that would be expected from a given radiative forcing, e.g. from a change in solar output or from a change in atmospheric greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations. It is usually defined in terms of a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentrations as a common re...

Extended Summary of the Climate Dialogue on Climate Sensitivity and Transient Climate Response