Observational Constraint of Aerosol Effects on the CMIP5 Inter-model Spread of Adjusted Forcings

The simulated global-mean temperature (GMT) change over the past 150 years is quite consistent across CMIP5 climate models and also consistent with the observations. However, the predicted future GMT under the identical CO2 forcing is divergent. This paradox is partly due to the errors in the predicted GMT produced by historical greenhouse gas (GHG) forcing being compensated by the parameterization of aerosol cloud radiative forcing. Historical increases in anthropogenic aerosols exert an overall (but highly uncertain) cooling effect in the climate system, which partially offsets the warming due to well mixed greenhouse gases (WMGHGs). Because aerosol concentrations are predicted to eventually decrease in future scenarios, climate change becomes dominated by warming due to the WMGHG. This change in the relative importance of forcing by aerosol versus WMGHG makes apparent the substantial differences in prediction of climate by WMGHG forcing. Here we investigate the role of aerosols in the context of adjusted forcing changes in the historical runs and the effect of aerosols on the cloud feedback. Our preliminary results suggest that models which are more sensitive to the increase in concentration of CO2 have a larger aerosol radiative cooling effect. By comparing the historicalMisc runs and historicalGHG runs, we find that aerosols exert a potential impact on the cloud adjusted forcings, especially shortwave cloud adjusted forcings. We use the CLIPSO, MISR and CERES data as the benchmark to evaluate the present aerosol simulations. Using satellite observations to assess the relative reliability of the different model responses and to constrain the simulated aerosol radiative forcing will contribute significantly to reducing the across model spread in future climate simulations and identifying some missing physical processes.