Lower Tropospheric Processes: A Control on the Global Mean Precipitation Rate

Global warming without global mean precipitation increase?

Global climate models simulate a robust increase of global mean precipitation of about 1.5 to 2% per kelvin surface warming in response to greenhouse gas (GHG) forcing. Here, it is shown that the sensitivity to aerosol cooling is robust as well, albeit roughly twice as large. This larger sensitivity is consistent with energy budget arguments. At the same time, it is still considerably lower tha...

A New Control Chart to Monitor Mean Shifts of Bi-Variate Quality Control Processes

Global warming trend of mean tropospheric temperature observed by satellites.

We have analyzed the global tropospheric temperature for 1978 to 2002 with the use of passive microwave sounding data from the NOAA series of polar orbiters and the Earth Observing System Aqua satellite. To accurately retrieve the climatic trend, we combined the satellite data with an analytic model of temperature that contains three different time scales: a linear trend and functions that defi...

Satellite Global and Hemispheric Lower Tropospheric Temperature Annual Temperature Cycle

Previous analyses of the Earth’s annual cycle and its trends have utilized surface temperature data sets. Here we introduce a new analysis of the global and hemispheric annual cycle using a satellite remote sensing derived data set during the period 1979–2009, as determined from the lower tropospheric (LT) channel of the MSU satellite. While the surface annual cycle is tied directly to the heat...

Global-mean precipitation and black carbon in AR4 simulations

[1] How much and why precipitation changes as the climate warms is uncertain, even for the global mean. In the 21st Century of the IPCC AR4 A1b forcing scenario, globalmean precipitation increase per degree warming varies among models by over a factor of three. Clear-sky atmospheric shortwave absorption change explains over half of the intermodel spread (r = 0.61) in precipitation increase. Rem...