2008/09/01 by Ka Kit Tung, Jiansong Zhou, C. D. Camp · 26 citations
Environmental Science · Earth and Planetary Sciences · #Climate variability and models #Atmospheric and Environmental Gas Dynamics #Oceanographic and Atmospheric Processes #Forcing (mathematics) #Climatology #Environmental science #Transient response #Climate sensitivity #Climate change #Climate model #Transient (computer programming) #Atmospheric sciences #Atmosphere (unit) #Meteorology #Computer science #Geology #Physics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1029/2008gl034240
published in Geophysical Research Letters 35(17) (American Geophysical Union)
openalex publication_date 2008/09/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
The phenomenon of 11‐year solar cycles has a well‐measured forcing, and the response in surface temperature is confirmed using multiple datasets, including reanalysis (NCEP/NCAR and ERA‐40) and blended in situ land‐ocean data (GISS and HadCRUT3). Missing coverage in the historical in situ station data reduces the amplitude of the response compared to the geographically complete reanalysis data, but all extracted signals are statistically robust. A transient climate sensitivity parameter can be defined once forcing and response are known. The coupled atmosphere‐ocean models participating in the 4th Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) span a large range in their transient climate response (TCR). Using observational results on the response to the 11‐year solar variation, we derive a constraint for the TCR. It is seen that, compared with our derived constraint, most models assessed by IPCC AR4 have too low a TCR, even lower than that derived from the station data.