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Abstract:

We have developed a radiative-convective model for the purpose of investigating the climate sensitivity to cloud radiative properties and the related feedback processes. Using this model, we find that the surface temperature increases with cloud optical thickness when the clouds are very thin and decreases with cloud optical depth when the shortwave cloud radiative forcing dominates the longwave cloud radiative forcing. A few percent variation in the cloud droplet size has a larger impact on the equilibrium state lower atmosphere temperature than the warming caused by doubling of the tex2html_wrap_inline579 concentration. When clouds are included in the model, the magnitude of the greenhouse effect due to doubling of the tex2html_wrap_inline579 concentration varies with the cloud optical thickness. The thicker the clouds, the weaker the greenhouse warming. A 2% increase of cloud equivalent radius per degree increase in temperature is sufficient to double the warming caused by the doubling of tex2html_wrap_inline579 concentration. This finding suggests that a physically reliable relation between cloud equivalent radius and the macrophysical meteorological properties on a global climate scale is needed to assess the climate impact of increases in greenhouse gases.







Yongxiang Hu
Mon Dec 23 13:36:01 EST 1996