Potential Biases in Feedback Diagnosis from Observational Data: A Simple Model Demonstration

Feedbacks are widely considered to be the largest source of uncertainty in determining the sensitivity of the climate system to increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations, yet the ability to diagnose them from observations has remained controversial. Here a simple model is used to demonstrate that any nonfeedback source of top-of-atmosphere radiative flux variations can cause temperature variability, which then results in a positive bias in diagnosed feedbacks. This effect is demonstrated with daily random flux variations, as might be caused by stochastic fluctuations in low cloud cover. The daily noise in radiative flux then causes interannual and decadal temperature variations in the model’s 50-m-deep swamp ocean. The amount of bias in the feedbacks diagnosed from time-averaged model output depends upon the size of the nonfeedback flux variability relative to the surface temperature variability, as well as the sign and magnitude of the specified (true) feedback. For model runs producing monthly shortwave flux anomaly and temperature anomaly statistics similar to those measured by satellites, the diagnosed feedbacks have positive biases generally in the range of 0.3 to 0.8 W m 2 K . These results suggest that current observational diagnoses of cloud feedback—and possibly other feedbacks—could be significantly biased in the positive direction.