Identification

Title

Diagnosis of middle-atmosphere climate sensitivity by the climate feedback–response analysis method

Abstract

The authors present a new method to diagnose the middle-atmosphere climate sensitivity by extending the climate feedback–response analysis method (CFRAM) for the coupled atmosphere–surface system to the middle atmosphere. The middle-atmosphere CFRAM (MCFRAM) is built on the atmospheric energy equation per unit mass with radiative heating and cooling rates as its major thermal energy sources. MCFRAM preserves CFRAM’s unique feature of additivity, such that partial temperature changes due to variations in external forcing and feedback processes can be added to give a total temperature change for direct comparison with the observed temperature change. In addition, MCFRAM establishes a physical relationship of radiative damping between the energy perturbations associated with various feedback processes and temperature perturbations associated with thermal responses. In this study, MCFRAM is applied to both observations and model output fields to diagnose the middle-atmosphere climate sensitivity. The authors found that the largest component of the middle-atmosphere temperature response to the 11-yr solar cycle (solar maximum vs solar minimum) is the partial temperature change due to the variation of the solar flux. Increasing CO₂ cools the middle atmosphere, whereas the partial temperature change due to changes in O₃ can be either positive or negative. The application of MCFRAM to model dynamical fields reconfirms the advantage of introducing the residual circulation to characterize middle-atmosphere dynamics in terms of the partial temperature changes. The radiatively driven globally averaged partial temperature change is approximately equal to the observed temperature change, ranging from -0.5 K near 25 km to -1.0 K near 70 km between solar maximum and solar minimum.

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document

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http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7sf2xmr

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Dataset language

eng

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geoscientificInformation

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title

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reference date

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publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

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publication

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2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

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Copyright 2016 American Meteorological Society (AMS). Permission to use figures, tables, and brief excerpts from this work in scientific and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is determined to be "fair use" under Section 107 or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law (17 USC, as revised by P.L. 94-553) does not require the Society's permission. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form on servers, or other uses of this material, except as exempted by the above statements, requires written permission or license from the AMS. Additional details are provided in the AMS Copyright Policies, available from the AMS at 617-227-2425 or amspubs@ametsoc.org. Permission to place a copy of this work on this server has been provided by the AMS. The AMS does not guarantee that the copy provided here is an accurate copy of the published work.

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OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

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pointOfContact

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