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Precipitation, radiative forcing and global temperature change
Author(s) -
Andrews Timothy,
Forster Piers M.,
Boucher Olivier,
Bellouin Nicolas,
Jones Andy
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1029/2010gl043991
Subject(s) - radiative forcing , environmental science , precipitation , atmospheric sciences , forcing (mathematics) , radiative transfer , climate change , climatology , cloud forcing , global change , cloud feedback , climate model , global temperature , global warming , climate sensitivity , meteorology , geology , physics , oceanography , quantum mechanics
Radiative forcing is a useful tool for predicting equilibrium global temperature change. However, it is not so useful for predicting global precipitation changes, as changes in precipitation strongly depend on the climate change mechanism and how it perturbs the atmospheric and surface energy budgets. Here a suite of climate model experiments and radiative transfer calculations are used to quantify and assess this dependency across a range of climate change mechanisms. It is shown that the precipitation response can be split into two parts: a fast atmospheric response that strongly correlates with the atmospheric component of radiative forcing, and a slower response to global surface temperature change that is independent of the climate change mechanism, ∼2‐3% per unit of global surface temperature change. We highlight the precipitation response to black carbon aerosol forcing as falling within this range despite having an equilibrium response that is of opposite sign to the radiative forcing and global temperature change.