Does internal climate variability impact radiative feedback estimates?

A lot of attention has been focussed on the inter-model spread in equilibrium climate sensitivity and the radiative feedbacks that contribute to it as a measure of our uncertainty of the climate system's response to external forcing. But how accurate is an estimate of this uncertainty derived purely from model-to-model differences? Recent work has highlighted the importance of factors such as differences resulting from methodology (Klocke et al., 2013) as well as internal climate variability (Deser et al., 2012), which have historically not been included in multi-model assessments. While an increasing number of models participating in Coupled Model Intercomparison Projects (CMIP) provide several ensemble members for certain simulations, the ensemble sizes are generally not large enough to fully sample climate's intrinsic variability. Here we use a large 40 member ensemble of simulations performed with the National Center for Atmospheric Research Community Climate System Model Version 3 to asses the impact of internal variability on radiative feedback estimates. We find that the spread in individual feedbacks among ensemble members corresponds to 25% of CMIP3 inter-model spread. Deser, C., A. Phillips, V. Bourdette and H. Teng (2012): Uncertainty in climate change projections: the role of internal variability, Clim. Dyn., 38, 527-546. Klocke, D., J. Quaas and B. Stevens (2013): Assessment of different metrics for physical climate feedbacks, Clim. Dyn., DOI 10.1007/s00382-013-1757-1