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Letters to Nature
Nature 429, 55-58 (6 May 2004) | doi:10.1038/nature02524; Received 8 December 2003; Accepted 29 March 2004
There is a Brief Communications Arising (2 December 2004) associated with this document.
There is a Brief Communications Arising (2 December 2004) associated with this document.
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Contribution of stratospheric cooling to satellite-inferred tropospheric temperature trends
Qiang Fu1, Celeste M. Johanson1, Stephen G. Warren1 & Dian J. Seidel2
- Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195, USA
- NOAA Air Resources Laboratory, Silver Spring, Maryland 20910, USA
Correspondence to: Qiang Fu1 Email: qfu@atmos.washington.edu
Abstract
From 1979 to 2001, temperatures observed globally by the mid-tropospheric channel of the satellite-borne Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU channel 2), as well as the inferred temperatures in the lower troposphere, show only small warming trends of less than 0.1 K per decade (refs 1–3). Surface temperatures based on in situ observations however, exhibit a larger warming of
0.17 K per decade (refs 4, 5), and global climate models forced by combined anthropogenic and natural factors project an increase in tropospheric temperatures that is somewhat larger than the surface temperature increase6, 7, 8. Here we show that trends in MSU channel 2 temperatures are weak because the instrument partly records stratospheric temperatures whose large cooling trend9 offsets the contributions of tropospheric warming. We quantify the stratospheric contribution to MSU channel 2 temperatures using MSU channel 4, which records only stratospheric temperatures. The resulting trend of reconstructed tropospheric temperatures from satellite data is physically consistent with the observed surface temperature trend. For the tropics, the tropospheric warming is
1.6 times the surface warming, as expected for a moist adiabatic lapse rate.
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