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Cooling effect of clouds ‘underestimated’ by climate models, says new study

June 12, 2021

Cooling effect of clouds ‘underestimated’ by climate models, says new study

Cooling effect of clouds ‘underestimated’ by climate models, says new study
 
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Clouds could have a greater cooling effect on the planet than climate models currently suggest, according to new research.

The paper, published in Nature Climate Change, aims to correct a “long-standing” and “unaddressed” problem in climate modelling – namely, that existing models simulate too much rainfall from clouds and, therefore, underestimate their lifespan and cooling effect.

The authors have updated an existing climate model with a more realistic simulation of rainfall from “warm” clouds – those that contain water only, rather than a combination of water and ice. They find that this update makes the “cloud-lifetime feedback” – a process in which warmer temperatures increase the lifespan of clouds – almost three times bigger.

The authors note that the newest generation of global climate models – the sixth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) – predicts faster future warming than its predecessors. This is largely because the new models simulate a smaller cooling effect from clouds.

However, the lead author of the study tells Carbon Brief that fixing the “problem” in rainfall simulations “reduces the amount of warming predicted by the model, by about the same amount as the warming increase between CMIP5 and CMIP6”.

Due to this, he says that the key takeaway from the study is to “take the extra warming in CMIP6 with a grain of salt until some of the other known cloud problems are also fixed in the models”.

Cooling clouds

The impact of clouds on global temperature is a complex area of research that scientists have been working on for decades.

In a Carbon Brief guest post published in 2018, Prof Ellie Highwood – professor of climate physics in the Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading – explains how clouds can affect global temperatures:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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