Journal
GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS
Volume 37, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION
DOI: 10.1029/2010GL043991
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Funding
- NERC with the Met Office
- DECC and Defra Integrated Climate Programme (DECC/Defra) [GA01101]
- ESRC [ES/G021694/1] Funding Source: UKRI
- NERC [NE/E016189/1] Funding Source: UKRI
- Economic and Social Research Council [ES/G021694/1] Funding Source: researchfish
- Natural Environment Research Council [NE/E016189/1] Funding Source: researchfish
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Radiative forcing is a useful tool for predicting equilibrium global temperature change. However, it is not so useful for predicting global precipitation changes, as changes in precipitation strongly depend on the climate change mechanism and how it perturbs the atmospheric and surface energy budgets. Here a suite of climate model experiments and radiative transfer calculations are used to quantify and assess this dependency across a range of climate change mechanisms. It is shown that the precipitation response can be split into two parts: a fast atmospheric response that strongly correlates with the atmospheric component of radiative forcing, and a slower response to global surface temperature change that is independent of the climate change mechanism, similar to 2-3% per unit of global surface temperature change. We highlight the precipitation response to black carbon aerosol forcing as falling within this range despite having an equilibrium response that is of opposite sign to the radiative forcing and global temperature change. Citation: Andrews, T., P. M. Forster, O. Boucher, N. Bellouin, and A. Jones (2010), Precipitation, radiative forcing and global temperature change, Geophys. Res. Lett., 37, L14701, doi: 10.1029/2010GL043991.
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