Drew Shindell & Greg Faluvegi, Nature Geoscience, 2 (2009): Climate response to regional radiative forcing during the twentieth century

Nature Geoscience, 2 (2009) 294–300, published online 22 March 2009 | doi:10.1038/ngeo473

Climate response to regional radiative forcing during the twentieth century

Drew Shindell* and Greg Faluvegi (NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and Columbia University, New York, NY 10025, U.S.A.)

Abstract

Regional climate change can arise from three different effects: regional changes to the amount of radiative heating that reaches the Earth's surface, an inhomogeneous response to globally uniform changes in radiative heating and variability without a specific forcing. The relative importance of these effects is not clear, particularly because neither the response to regional forcings nor the regional forcings themselves are well known for the twentieth century. Here we investigate the sensitivity of regional climate to changes in carbon dioxide, black carbon aerosols, sulphate aerosols and ozone in the tropics, mid-latitudes and polar regions, using a coupled ocean–atmosphere model. We find that mid- and high-latitude climate is quite sensitive to the location of the forcing. Using these relationships between forcing and response along with observations of twentieth century climate change, we reconstruct radiative forcing from aerosols in space and time. Our reconstructions broadly agree with historical emissions estimates, and can explain the differences between observed changes in Arctic temperatures and expectations from non-aerosol forcings plus unforced variability. We conclude that decreasing concentrations of sulphate aerosols and increasing concentrations of black carbon have substantially contributed to rapid Arctic warming during the past three decades.

*Corresponding author. e-mail: Drew.T.Shindell@nasa.gov

Link to abstract: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v2/n4/abs/ngeo473.html