Clear-sky biases in satellite infrared estimates of upper tropospheric humidity and its trends

We use microwave retrievals of upper tropospheric humidity (UTH) to estimate the impact of clear-sky-only sampling by infrared instruments on the distribution, variability and trends in UTH. Our method isolates the impact of the clear-sky-only sampling, without convolving errors from other sources. On daily time scales IR-sampled UTH contains large data gaps in convectively active areas, with only about 20-30 % of the tropics (30 S­ 30 N) being sampled. This results in a dry bias of about -9 %RH in the area-weighted tropical daily UTH time series. On monthly scales, maximum clear-sky bias (CSB) is up to -30 %RH over convectively active areas. The magnitude of CSB shows significant correlations with UTH itself (-0.5) and also with the variability in UTH (-0.6). We also show that IR-sampled UTH time series have higher interannual variability and smaller trends compared to microwave sampling. We argue that a significant part of the smaller trend results from the contrasting influence of diurnal drift in the satellite measurements on the wet and dry regions of the tropics

Extent and Causes of Chesapeake Bay Warming

Coastal environments such as the Chesapeake Bay have long been impacted by eutrophication stressors resulting from human activities, and these impacts are now being compounded by global warming trends. However, there are few studies documenting long-term estuarine temperature change and the relative contributions of rivers, the atmosphere, and the ocean. In this study, Chesapeake Bay warming, since 1985, is quantified using a combination of cruise observations and model outputs, and the relative contributions to that warming are estimated via numerical sensitivity experiments with a watershed–estuarine modeling system. Throughout the Bay’s main stem, similar warming rates are found at the surface and bottom between the late 1980s and late 2010s (0.02 +/- 0.02C/year, mean +/- 1 standard error), with elevated summer rates (0.04 +/- 0.01C/year) and lower rates of winter warming (0.01 +/- 0.01C/year). Most (~85%) of this estuarine warming is driven by atmospheric effects. The secondary influence of ocean warming increases with proximity to the Bay mouth, where it accounts for more than half of summer warming in bottom waters. Sea level rise has slightly reduced summer warming, and the influence of riverine warming has been limited to the heads of tidal tributaries. Future rates of warming in Chesapeake Bay will depend not only on global atmospheric trends, but also on regional circulation patterns in mid-Atlantic waters, which are currently warming faster than the atmosphere. Supporting model data available at: https://doi.org/10.25773/c774-a36

Water vapor and lapse rate feedbacks in the climate system

Water vapor is a greenhouse gas that dominates Earth's terrestrial radiation absorption. As the planetary temperature warms, forced by increasing CO2 and other greenhouse gases, water vapor content of the atmosphere increases, thereby producing the strongest positive feedback in the climate system. At the same time, the rate at which atmospheric temperature drops with height (the "lapse rate") is expected to decrease with warming. This represents a smaller, but significant, negative feedback since it enables the planet to radiate more effectively to space. The two feedbacks are closely coupled to each other, and the combined result represents the foundational net positive feedback in the climate system, mandating substantial global warming in response to increased greenhouse gases. This review summarizes the published work that has provided an ever deepening understanding of these critical feedbacks. The historical context, beginning with the 19th century awakening to the importance of water vapor in the climate, is outlined before the review's focus shifts to the theoretical, observational, and modeling work in recent decades that has transformed our understanding of the feedbacks' role in climate change. It is shown that the evidence is now overwhelming that combined water vapor and lapse rate processes indeed provide the strongest positive feedback in the climate system. However, important challenges remain. This review provides physicists with a deeper understanding of these feedbacks and stimulates engagement with the climate research community. Together the scientific community can facilitate further rigor, understanding, and confidence in these most fundamental Earth system processes. © 2021 American Physical Society

Atmospheric warming and the amplification of precipitation extremes

Climate models suggest that extreme precipitation events will become more common in an anthropogenically warmed climate. However, observational limitations have hindered a direct evaluation of model-projected changes in extreme precipitation. We used satellite observations and model simulations to examine the response of tropical precipitation events to naturally driven changes in surface temperature and atmospheric moisture content. These observations reveal a distinct link between rainfall extremes and temperature, with heavy rain events increasing during warm periods and decreasing during cold periods. Furthermore, the observed amplification of rainfall extremes is found to be larger than that predicted by models, implying that projections of future changes in rainfall extremes in response to anthropogenic global warming may be underestimated

Influence of Vertical Wind Shear on the Ocean Response to Tropical Cyclones Based on Satellite Observations

We here investigate the effects of tropical cyclone (TC)-induced rainfall asymmetries driven by vertical wind shear on ocean salinity and temperature response to TCs using satellite and in situ observations. On average, TCs tend to initially freshen the ocean surface due to heavy rainfall and subsequently salinity from upwelling and vertical mixing, with strongest surface salinification on the right-hand side of the Northern Hemisphere TCs. The direction of shear has been found to control the location of maximum TC rainfall, resulting in more freshwater accumulation on the right-hand side of the right-sheared storms. The accumulated freshwater strengthens salinity stratification and inhibits right-side biased vertical mixing, reducing subsequent surface salinification by 0.15–0.3 psu and slightly suppressing the surface cooling by about 0.15°C, relative to left-sheared storms. Thus, the directionality of shear can impact ocean-TC coupling

Evaluating Observational Constraints on Intermodel Spread in Cloud, Temperature, and Humidity Feedbacks

Uncertainty in climate feedbacks is the primary source of the spread in projected surface temperature responses to anthropogenic forcing. Cloud feedback persistently appears as the main source of disagreement in future projections while the combined lapse-rate plus water vapor (LR + WV) feedback is a smaller (30%), but non-trivial source of uncertainty in climate sensitivity. Here we attempt to observationally constrain the feedbacks in an effort to reduce their intermodel uncertainties. The observed interannual variation provides a useful constraint on the long-term cloud feedback, as evidenced by the consistency of global-mean values and regional contributions to the intermodel spread on both interannual and long-term timescales. However, interannual variability does not serve to constrain the long-term LR + WV feedback spread, which we find is dominated by the varying tropical relative humidity (RH) response to interhemispheric warming differences under clear-sky conditions and the RH-fixed LR feedback under all-sky conditions. © 2021. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved

Examining the Role of Cloud Radiative Interactions in Tropical Cyclone Development Using Satellite Measurements and WRF Simulations

This study examines the role of cloud-radiative interactions in the development of tropical cyclones using satellite measurements and model simulations. Previous modeling studies have found that the enhanced cloud radiative heating from longwave radiation in the convective region plays a key role in promoting the development of tropical convective systems. Here, we use satellite measurements and Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF) simulations to further investigate how critical cloud radiative interactions are to the development of tropical cyclones (TCs). Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System measurements show that intensifying TCs have greater radiative heating from clouds within the TC area than weakening ones. Based on this result, idealized WRF simulations are performed to examine the importance of the enhanced radiative heating to TC intensification. Sensitivity experiments demonstrate that removing cloud-radiative interactions often inhibits tropical cyclogenesis, suggesting that cloud-radiative interactions play a critical role

Investigating the Causes and Impacts of Convective Aggregation in a High Resolution Atmospheric GCM

A ∼50 km resolution atmospheric general circulation model (GCM) is used to investigate the impact of radiative interactions on spatial organization of convection, the model's mean state, and extreme precipitation events in the presence of realistic boundary conditions. Mechanism-denial experiments are performed in which synoptic-scale feedbacks between radiation and dynamics are suppressed by overwriting the model-generated atmospheric radiative cooling rates with its monthly varying climatological values. When synoptic-scale radiative interactions are disabled, the annual mean circulation and precipitation remain almost unchanged, however tropical convection becomes less aggregated, with an increase in cloud fraction and relative humidity in the free troposphere but a decrease in both variables in the boundary layer. Changes in cloud fraction and relative humidity in the boundary layer exhibit more sensitivity to the presence of radiative interactions than variations in the degree of aggregation. The less aggregated state is associated with a decrease in the frequency of extreme precipitation events, coincident with a decrease in the dynamical contribution to the magnitude of extreme precipitation. At regional scales, the spatial contrast in radiative cooling between dry and moist regions diminishes when radiative interactions are suppressed, reducing the upgradient transport of energy, degree of aggregation, and frequency of extreme precipitation events. However, the mean width of the tropical rain belt remains almost unaffected when radiative interactions are disabled. These results offer insights into how radiation-circulation coupling affects the spatial organization of convection, distributions of clouds and humidity, and weather extremes

Evaluation of CloudSat Radiative Kernels Using ARM and CERES Observations and ERA5 Reanalysis

Despite the widespread use of the radiative kernel technique for studying radiative feedbacks and radiative forcings, there has not been any systematic, observation-based validation of the radiative kernel method. Here, we utilize observed and reanalyzed radiative fluxes and atmospheric profiles from the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program and ERA5 reanalysis to assess a set of observation-based radiative kernels from CloudSat for six ARM sites. The CloudSat radiative kernels, convoluted with the ERA5 state variables, can almost perfectly reconstruct the monthly anomalies of shortwave (SW) and longwave (LW) radiative fluxes in ERA5 at the surface (SFC) and top-of-atmosphere (TOA) with correlations significantly being greater than 0.95. The biases of kernel-estimated flux anomalies calculated using the ARM-observed state variables can be more than twice as large when compared with the ARM-observed surface flux anomalies and Clouds and Earth's Radiant Energy System observed anomalies at the TOA. Generally, clouds contribute to most (>60%) of the variance of flux anomalies at Southern Great Plain (SGP), Tropical Western Pacific (TWP), and Eastern North Atlantic (ENA), and surface albedo dominates (>69%) the variance of SW flux anomalies at North Slope of Alaska. The radiative kernels exhibit the lowest correlation (r∼[0.55,0.85]) when reconstructing SFC LW flux anomalies at SGP, TWP, and ENA, whose biases are related to the possibility that the kernels may not fully capture the characteristics associated with Madden-Julian oscillation and El Niño-Southern Oscillation at TWP and the presence of clouds at SGP and ENA. © 2021. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved

Reconciling opposing Walker circulation trends in observations and model projections

A strengthening of the Pacific Walker circulation (PWC) over recent decades triggered an intense debate on the validity of model-projected weakening of the PWC in response to anthropogenic warming. However, limitations of in situ observations and reanalysis datasets have hindered an unambiguous attribution of PWC changes to either natural or anthropogenic causes. Here, by conducting a comprehensive analysis based on multiple independent observational records, including satellite observations along with a large ensemble of model simulations, we objectively determine the relative contributions of internal variability and anthropogenic warming to the emergence of long-term PWC trends. Our analysis shows that the satellite-observed changes differ considerably from the model ensemble-mean changes, but they also indicate substantially weaker strengthening than implied by the reanalyses. Furthermore, some ensemble members are found to reproduce the observed changes in the tropical Pacific. These findings clearly reveal a dominant role of internal variability on the recent strengthening of the PWC. © 2019, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limite