{"id":58241,"date":"2021-06-12T05:47:56","date_gmt":"2021-06-12T10:47:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=58241"},"modified":"2021-06-12T05:47:56","modified_gmt":"2021-06-12T10:47:56","slug":"cooling-effect-of-clouds-underestimated-by-climate-models-says-new-study","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=58241","title":{"rendered":"Cooling effect of clouds \u2018underestimated\u2019 by climate models, says new study"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Cooling effect of clouds \u2018underestimated\u2019 by climate models, says new study<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Cooling effect of clouds \u2018underestimated\u2019 by climate models, says new study<\/span><\/strong><\/div>\n
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Clouds could have a greater cooling effect on the planet than climate models currently suggest, according to new research.<\/p>\n

The paper, published in\u00a0Nature Climate Change<\/a>, aims to correct a \u201clong-standing\u201d and \u201cunaddressed\u201d problem in climate modelling \u2013 namely, that existing models simulate too much rainfall from clouds and, therefore, underestimate their lifespan and cooling effect.<\/p>\n

The authors have updated an existing climate model with a more realistic simulation of rainfall from \u201cwarm\u201d clouds \u2013 those that contain water only, rather than a combination of water and ice. They find that this update makes the \u201ccloud-lifetime feedback\u201d \u2013 a process in which warmer temperatures increase the lifespan of clouds \u2013 almost three times bigger.<\/p>\n

The authors note that the newest generation of global climate models \u2013 the sixth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6<\/a>) \u2013 predicts\u00a0faster future warming<\/a>\u00a0than its predecessors. This is largely because the new models simulate a\u00a0smaller cooling effect from clouds<\/a>.<\/p>\n

However, the lead author of the study tells Carbon Brief that fixing the \u201cproblem\u201d in rainfall simulations \u201creduces the amount of warming predicted by the model, by about the same amount as the warming increase between CMIP5 and CMIP6\u201d.<\/p>\n

Due to this, he says that the key takeaway from the study is to \u201ctake the extra warming in CMIP6 with a grain of salt until some of the other known cloud problems are also fixed in the models\u201d.<\/p>\n

Cooling clouds<\/strong><\/p>\n

The impact of clouds on global temperature is a\u00a0complex area of research<\/a>\u00a0that scientists have been working on for decades.<\/p>\n

In a\u00a0Carbon Brief<\/a>\u00a0guest post published in 2018,\u00a0Prof Ellie Highwood<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 professor of climate physics in the\u00a0Department of Meteorology<\/a>\u00a0at the\u00a0University of Reading<\/a> \u2013 explains how clouds can affect global temperatures:<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cooling effect of clouds \u2018underestimated\u2019 by climate models, says new study Cooling effect of clouds \u2018underestimated\u2019 by climate models, says new study \u00a0 *\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0*\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0* Clouds could have a greater cooling effect on the planet than climate models currently suggest, according to new research. The paper, published in\u00a0Nature Climate Change, aims to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[31331,10797,31334,9104,31332,31333,9295,29975],"class_list":["post-58241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-ayesha-tandon","tag-carbon-brief","tag-clilmate-change","tag-climate-modelling","tag-clouds","tag-cooling-effect","tag-nature-climate-change","tag-predictive-models"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58241"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58242,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58241\/revisions\/58242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}