Assessing the role of snow albedo feedback in climate change (Invited)
Abstract
Snow albedo feedback (SAF) is expected to have both global and regional impacts on future climate as atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations increase. The global impact arises through changes to the climate sensitivity caused by decreases in surface and planetary albedo related to melting snow and ice. Regional impacts are likely to arise, at least on decadal-to-centennial timescales, because the rate of surface warming will be faster over land than over the oceans. These changes could have particularly important implications for the climate and hydrology of high latitude regions. However, the current generation of climate models shows a large spread in the predictions of how strong the future SAF will be. A lack of adequate data has hampered previous attempts to determine what the real value of SAF is for the current climate, making it difficult to evaluate model performance. In this study we use newly available satellite-based observational datasets to perform a detailed comparison of SAF in the present climate with the CMIP3 model archive. I will present these results and discuss their potential implications for predictions of global and regional climate change.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2010
- Bibcode:
- 2010AGUFM.A44B..03F
- Keywords:
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- 0736 CRYOSPHERE / Snow;
- 1621 GLOBAL CHANGE / Cryospheric change;
- 1637 GLOBAL CHANGE / Regional climate change;
- 3305 ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSES / Climate change and variability