ClimaTea Journal Club: "Circulation response to warming shaped by radiative changes of clouds and water vapour"

Date: 

Tuesday, March 10, 2015, 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Location: 

HUCE Seminar Room

GS Ding Ma will be presenting Voigt and Shaw (2015), "Circulation response to warming shaped by radiative changes of clouds and water vapour" (attached).

Ding says the following about the paper:

Response of the atmospheric circulation changes to global warming has been intensively investigated. Although the increase in global-mean precipitation is robust, the regional precipitation changes associated with the anomalous circulation remain uncertain. Voigt and Shaw (2015) started from the disagreement on tropical precipitation response between two CMIP5 aquaplanet models, and looked into the role of radiative changes caused by clouds and water vapor. The authors argued that feedback between ice cloud and upward motion is the key to the disagreement, which mainly stems from different responses of tropical ice cloud in the two models. Also, it is found that cloud changes lead to poleward shift of the extratropical jets, and water vapor changes compensate for the effect to certain extent.
voigtshaw2015.pdf498 KB