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Low clouds link equilibrium climate sensitivity to hydrological sensitivity

Nature Climate Change volume 8, pages 901–906 (2018)Cite this article

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Abstract

Equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) and hydrological sensitivity describe the global mean surface temperature and precipitation responses to a doubling of atmospheric CO2. Despite their connection via the Earth’s energy budget, the physical linkage between these two metrics remains controversial. Here, using a global climate model with a perturbed mean hydrological cycle, we show that ECS and hydrological sensitivity per unit warming are anti-correlated owing to the low-cloud response to surface warming. When the amount of low clouds decreases, ECS is enhanced through reductions in the reflection of shortwave radiation. In contrast, hydrological sensitivity is suppressed through weakening of atmospheric longwave cooling, necessitating weakened condensational heating by precipitation. These compensating cloud effects are also robustly found in a multi-model ensemble, and further constrained using satellite observations. Our estimates, combined with an existing constraint to clear-sky shortwave absorption, suggest that hydrological sensitivity could be lower by 30% than raw estimates from global climate models.

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Fig. 1: Schematic of Earth’s radiative budgets at the TOA and surface.
Fig. 2: Inverse relationship between ECS and η in various climate model ensembles.
Fig. 3: Sources of spread in λ and η across the PerSE P4K experiments.
Fig. 4: Illustration of low-cloud changes connecting climate feedback with the atmospheric energy budget.
Fig. 5: Process-level linkage between cloud feedbacks contributing to ECS and η.
Fig. 6: Emergent constraint on surface longwave CRE feedback and revisions to η.

Data availability

The CMIP5 data supporting the findings of this study are available in the Supplementary Information and also from http://cmip-pcmdi.llnl.gov/cmip5/. The raw outputs of the MIROC5 experiments are available from the corresponding author upon request.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the modelling groups, PCMDI and WCRP’s WGCM for efforts in making the CMIP5 multi-model dataset available. We thank M. Webb and H. Su for helpful comments. This work was supported by Grant-in-Aid 26247079 and the Integrated Research Program for Advancing Climate Models from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan. The model simulations were performed using Earth Simulator at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology and the NEC SX at the National Institute for Environmental Studies, Japan.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

    Masahiro Watanabe & Kentaroh Suzuki

  2. Faculty of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan

    Youichi Kamae

  3. Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

    Youichi Kamae

  4. Center for Global Environmental Research, National Institute for Environmental Studies, Tsukuba, Japan

    Hideo Shiogama

  5. Global Modeling and Assimilation Office, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA

    Anthony M. DeAngelis

  6. Science Systems and Applications, Lanham, MD, USA

    Anthony M. DeAngelis

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  1. Masahiro Watanabe
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Contributions

M.W. designed the research. H.S. and M.W. conducted the numerical experiments. M.W. and Y.K. performed the analysis and wrote the paper. All authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Masahiro Watanabe.

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Watanabe, M., Kamae, Y., Shiogama, H. et al. Low clouds link equilibrium climate sensitivity to hydrological sensitivity. Nature Clim Change 8, 901–906 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0272-0

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