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lmd_Bony2015_abstracts.html

2015 .

(3 publications)

S. Bony, B. Stevens, D. M. W. Frierson, C. Jakob, M. Kageyama, R. Pincus, T. G. Shepherd, S. C. Sherwood, A. P. Siebesma, A. H. Sobel, M. Watanabe, and M. J. Webb. Clouds, circulation and climate sensitivity. Nature Geoscience, 8:261-268, April 2015. [ bib | DOI | ADS link ]

Fundamental puzzles of climate science remain unsolved because of our limited understanding of how clouds, circulation and climate interact. One example is our inability to provide robust assessments of future global and regional climate changes. However, ongoing advances in our capacity to observe, simulate and conceptualize the climate system now make it possible to fill gaps in our knowledge. We argue that progress can be accelerated by focusing research on a handful of important scientific questions that have become tractable as a result of recent advances. We propose four such questions below; they involve understanding the role of cloud feedbacks and convective organization in climate, and the factors that control the position, the strength and the variability of the tropical rain belts and the extratropical storm tracks.

B. Medeiros, B. Stevens, and S. Bony. Using aquaplanets to understand the robust responses of comprehensive climate models to forcing. Climate Dynamics, 44:1957-1977, April 2015. [ bib | DOI | ADS link ]

Idealized climate change experiments using fixed sea-surface temperature are investigated to determine whether zonally symmetric aquaplanet configurations are useful for understanding climate feedbacks in more realistic configurations. The aquaplanets capture many of the robust responses of the large-scale circulation and hydrologic cycle to both warming the sea-surface temperature and quadrupling atmospheric CO2. The cloud response to both perturbations varies across models in both Earth-like and aquaplanet configurations, and this spread arises primarily from regions of large-scale subsidence. Most models produce a consistent cloud change across the subsidence regimes, and the feedback in trade-wind cumulus regions dominates the tropical response. It is shown that these trade-wind regions have similar cloud feedback in Earth-like and aquaplanet warming experiments. The tropical average cloud feedback of the Earth-like experiment is captured by five of eight aquaplanets, and the three outliers are investigated to understand the discrepancy. In two models, the discrepancy is due to warming induced dissipation of stratocumulus decks in the Earth-like configuration which are not represented in the aquaplanet. One model shows a circulation response in the aquaplanet experiment accompanied by a cloud response that differs from the Earth-like configuration. Quadrupling atmospheric CO2 in aquaplanets produces slightly greater adjusted forcing than in Earth-like configurations, showing that land-surface effects dampen the adjusted forcing. The analysis demonstrates how aquaplanets, as part of a model hierarchy, help elucidate robust aspects of climate change and develop understanding of the processes underlying them.

M. J. Webb, A. P. Lock, A. Bodas-Salcedo, S. Bony, J. N. S. Cole, T. Koshiro, H. Kawai, C. Lacagnina, F. M. Selten, R. Roehrig, and B. Stevens. The diurnal cycle of marine cloud feedback in climate models. Climate Dynamics, 44:1419-1436, March 2015. [ bib | DOI | ADS link ]

We examine the diurnal cycle of marine cloud feedback using high frequency outputs in CFMIP-2 idealised uniform +4 K SST perturbation experiments from seven CMIP5 models. Most of the inter-model spread in the diurnal mean marine shortwave cloud feedback can be explained by low cloud responses, although these do not explain the model responses at the neutral/weakly negative end of the feedback range, where changes in mid and high level cloud properties are more important. All of the models show reductions in marine low cloud fraction in the warmer climate, and these are in almost all cases largest in the mornings when more cloud is present in the control simulations. This results in shortwave cloud feedbacks being slightly stronger and having the largest inter-model spread at this time of day. The diurnal amplitudes of the responses of marine cloud properties to the warming climate are however small compared to the inter-model differences in their diurnally meaned responses. This indicates that the diurnal cycle of cloud feedback is not strongly relevant to understanding inter-model spread in overall cloud feedback and climate sensitivity. A number of unusual behaviours in individual models are highlighted for future investigation.

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