Aerosol and cloud data from the MODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) onboard the Earth Observing System (EOS) Aqua are used to investigate interannual variability of smoke and warm cloud relationships during the dry-to-wet transition season (August–October) over the Amazon for two years and its association with meteorological conditions. In one year (2003), smoke aerosols are a...

The effect of aerosol on clouds poses one of the largest uncertainties in estimating the anthropogenic contribution to climate change. Small human-induced perturbations to cloud characteristics via aerosol pathways can create a change in the top-of-atmosphere radiative forcing of hundreds of Wm−2. Here we focus on links between aerosol and deep convective clouds of the Atlantic and Pacific Inte...

This paper highlights how the emerging record of satellite observations from the Earth Observation System (EOS) and A-Train constellation are advancing our ability to more completely document and understand the underlying processes associated with variations in the Earth’s top-of-atmosphere (TOA) radiation budget. Large-scale TOA radiation changes during the past decade are observed to be withi...

Much recent work has focused on unforced global mean surface air temperature (T) variability associated with the efficiency of heat transport into the deep ocean. Here the relationship between unforced variability in T and the Earth’s top-of-atmosphere (TOA) energy balance is explored in preindustrial control runs of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 multimodel ensemble. It is f...

Perturbed physics configurations of the HadAM3 atmospheric model driven with observed sea surface temperatures (SST) and sea ice were tuned to outgoing radiation observations using a Gauss-Newton line-search optimisation algorithm to adjust the model parameters. Four key parameters, that previous research found affected climate sensitivity, were adjusted to several different target values inclu...