Open AccessResolved Snowball Earth Clouds
Author(s) -
Dorian S. Abbot
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
journal of climate
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.315
H-Index - 287
eISSN - 1520-0442
pISSN - 0894-8755
DOI - 10.1175/jcli-d-13-00738.1
Subject(s) - snowball earth , longwave , climate model , climatology , atmospheric sciences , cloud forcing , cloud height , cloud cover , environmental science , cloud albedo , geology , convection , cloud computing , meteorology , climate change , radiative transfer , glacial period , geography , physics , oceanography , quantum mechanics , geomorphology , computer science , operating system
Recent general circulation model (GCM) simulations have challenged the idea that a snowball Earth would be nearly entirely cloudless. This is important because clouds would provide a strong warming to a high-albedo snowball Earth. GCM results suggest that clouds could lower the threshold CO2 needed to deglaciate a snowball by a factor of 10–100, enough to allow consistency with geochemical data. Here a cloud-resolving model is used to investigate cloud and convection behavior in a snowball Earth climate. The model produces convection that extends vertically to a similar temperature as modern tropical convection. This convection produces clouds that resemble stratocumulus clouds under an inversion on modern Earth, which slowly dissipate by sedimentation of cloud ice. There is enough cloud ice for the clouds to be optically thick in the longwave, and the resulting cloud radiative forcing is similar to that produced in GCMs run in snowball conditions. This result is robust to large changes in the cloud microphysics scheme because the cloud longwave forcing, which dominates the total forcing, is relatively insensitive to cloud amount and particle size. The cloud-resolving model results are therefore consistent with the idea that clouds would provide a large warming to a snowball Earth, helping to allow snowball deglaciation.