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How subtropical marine low cloud cover (LCC) will respond to global warming is a major source of uncertainty in future climate change. Although the estimated inversion strength (EIS) is a good predictive index of LCC, it has a serious limitation when applied to evaluate LCC changes due to warming:The LCC decreases despite increases in EIS in future climate simulations of global climate models (GCMs). In this work, using stateof-the-art GCMs, we show that the recently proposed estimated cloud-top entrainment index (ECTEI) decreases consistently with LCC in warmer sea surface temperature (SST) climates. For the patterned SST warming predicted by coupled GCMs, ECTEI can constrain the subtropical marine LCC feedback to -0.41 ± 0.28% K-1 (90% CI), implying virtually certain positive feedback. ECTEI physically explains the heuristic model for LCC changes based on a linear combination of EIS and SST changes in previous studies in terms of cloud-top entrainment processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because of the large carbon sequestration potential, reforestation and afforestation (R&A) are among the most prominent natural climate solutions. However, while their effectiveness is well established for wet tropics, it is often argued that R&A are less advantageous or even detrimental at higher latitudes, where the reduction of forest albedo (the amount of reflected solar radiation by a surface) tends to nullify or even overcome the carbon benefits. Here, we carefully analyze the situation for R&A at midlatitudes, where the warming effects due to vegetation albedo are regarded to be almost balanced by the cooling effects from an increased carbon storage. Using both satellite data and atmospheric boundary-layer models, we show that by including cloud-albedo effects due to land-atmosphere interactions, the R&A cooling at midlatitudes becomes prevalent. This points to a much greater potential of R&A for wet temperate regions than previously considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussions of countering global warming with solar geoengineering assume that warming owing to rising greenhouse-gas concentrations can be compensated by artificially reducing the amount of sunlight Earth absorbs. However, solar geoengineering may not be fail-safe to prevent global warming because CO2 can directly affect cloud cover: It reduces cloud cover by modulating the longwave radiative cooling within the atmosphere. This effect is not mitigated by solar geoengineering. Here, we use idealized high-resolution simulations of clouds to show that, even under a sustained solar geoengineering scenario with initially only modest warming, subtropical stratocumulus clouds gradually thin and may eventually break up into scattered cumulus clouds, at concentrations exceeding 1,700 parts per million (ppm). Because stratocumulus clouds cover large swaths of subtropical oceans and cool Earth by reflecting incident sunlight, their loss would trigger strong (about 5 K) global warming. Thus, the results highlight that, at least in this extreme and idealized scenario, solar geoengineering may not suffice to counter greenhouse-gas-driven global warming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

General circulation models show that as the surface temperature increases, the convective anvil clouds shrink. By analyzing radiative-convective equilibrium simulations, we show that this behavior is rooted in basic energetic and thermodynamic properties of the atmosphere: As the climatewarms, the clouds rise and remain at nearly the same temperature, but find themselves in a more stable atmosphere; this enhanced stability reduces the convective outflow in the upper troposphere and decreases the anvil cloud fraction. By warming the troposphere and increasing the upper-tropospheric stability, the clustering of deep convection also reduces the convective outflow and the anvil cloud fraction. When clouds are radiatively active, this robust coupling between temperature, high clouds, and circulation exerts a positive feedback on convective aggregation and favors the maintenance of strongly aggregated atmospheric states at high temperatures. This stability iris mechanism likely contributes to the narrowing of rainy areas as the climate warms. Whether or not it influences climate sensitivity requires further investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the climate system, two types of radiative feedback are in operation. The feedback of the first kind involves the radiative damping of the vertically uniform temperature perturbation of the troposphere and Earth's surface that approximately follows the Stefan-Boltzmann law of blackbody radiation. The second kind involves the change in the vertical lapse rate of temperature, water vapor, and clouds in the troposphere and albedo of the Earth's surface. Using satellite observations of the annual variation of the outgoing flux of longwave radiation and that of reflected solar radiation at the top of the atmosphere, this study estimates the so-called "gain factor," which characterizes the strength of radiative feedback of the second kind that operates on the annually varying, global-scale perturbation of temperature at the Earth's surface. The gain factor is computed not only for all sky but also for clear sky. The gain factor of so-called "cloud radiative forcing" is then computed as the difference between the two. The gain factors thus obtained are compared with those obtained from 35 models that were used for the fourth and fifth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment. Here, we show that the gain factors obtained from satellite observations of cloud radiative forcing are effective for identifying systematic biases of the feedback processes that control the sensitivity of simulated climate, providing useful information for validating and improving a climate model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the effect of the reduction of anvil clouds on cloud feedback based on the thermodynamic mechanism proposed by scientist Sandrine Bony that may cause the temperature profile to become more stable in the upper troposphere when the Earth warms. He examines the role of cloud feedback that contributes to uncertainty in climate sensitivity. Also investigated is the occurrence of cancellation between the long wave and short wave effects of tropical convective clouds.