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What ocean heating reveals about global warming

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The heat content of the oceans is growing and growing.  That means that the greenhouse effect has not taken a pause and the cold sun is not noticeably slowing global warming.

NOAA posts regularly updated measurements of the amount of heat stored in the bulk of the oceans.  For the upper 2000 m (deeper than that not much happens) it looks like this:

heat_content2000m

Change in the heat content in the upper 2000 m of the world’s oceans. Source: NOAA


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On mismatches between models and observations

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It is a truism that all models are wrong. Just as no map can capture the real landscape and no portrait the true self, numerical models by necessity have to contain approximations to the complexity of the real world and so can never be perfect replications of reality. Similarly, any specific observations are only partial reflections of what is actually happening and have multiple sources of error. It is therefore to be expected that there will be discrepancies between models and observations. However, why these arise and what one should conclude from them are interesting and more subtle than most people realise. Indeed, such discrepancies are the classic way we learn something new – and it often isn’t what people first thought of.
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The answer is blowing in the wind: The warming went into the deep end

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There has been an unusual surge of interest in the climate sensitivity based on the last decade’s worth of temperature measurements, and a lengthy story in the Economist tries to argue that the climate sensitivity may be lower than previously estimated. I think its conclusion is somewhat misguided because it missed some important pieces of information (also see skepticalscience’s take on this story here).

The ocean heat content and the global mean sea level height have marched on.

While the Economist referred to some unpublished work, it missed a new paper by Balmaseda et al. (2013) which provides a more in-depth insight. Balmaseda et al suggest that the recent years may not have much effect on the climate sensitivity after all, and according to their analysis, it is the winds blowing over the oceans that may be responsible for the ‘slow-down’ presented in the Economist.

[Read more…] about The answer is blowing in the wind: The warming went into the deep end

References

  1. M.A. Balmaseda, K.E. Trenberth, and E. Källén, "Distinctive climate signals in reanalysis of global ocean heat content", Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 40, pp. 1754-1759, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/grl.50382

Ice hockey

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Eric Steig

It is well known that ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula have collapsed on several occasions in the last couple of decades, that ice shelves in West Antarctica are thinning rapidly, and that the large outlet glaciers that drain the West Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS) are accelerating. The rapid drainage of the WAIS into the ocean is a major contributor to sea level rise (around 10% of the total, at the moment).

All of these observations match the response, predicted in the late 1970s by glaciologist John Mercer, of the Antarctic to anthropogenic global warming. As such, they are frequently taken as harbingers of greater future sea level rise to come. Are they?

Two papers published this week in Nature Geoscience provide new information that helps to address this question. One of the studies (led by me) says “probably”, while another (Abram et al.) gives a more definitive “yes”. [Read more…] about Ice hockey

Should regional climate models take the blame?

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Kerr (2013) recently provided a critical review of regional climate models (“RCMs”). I think his views have caused a stir in the regional climate model community. So what’s the buzz all about?

RCMs provide important input to many climate services, for which there is a great deal of vested interest on all levels. On the international stage, high-level talks lead to the establishment of a Global Framework for Climate Services (GFCS) during the World Climate Conference 3 (WCC3) in Geneva 2009.

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References

  1. R.A. Kerr, "Forecasting Regional Climate Change Flunks Its First Test", Science, vol. 339, pp. 638-638, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.339.6120.638

2012 Updates to model-observation comparisons

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Time for the 2012 updates!

As has become a habit (2009, 2010, 2011), here is a brief overview and update of some of the most discussed model/observation comparisons, updated to include 2012. I include comparisons of surface temperatures, sea ice and ocean heat content to the CMIP3 and Hansen et al (1988) simulations.
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On Sensitivity Part II: Constraining Cloud Feedback without Cloud Observations

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Guest Commentary by Karen M. Shell, Oregon State University

Link to Part I.

Clouds are very pesky for climate scientists. Due to their high spatial and temporal variability, as well as the many processes involved in cloud droplet formation, clouds are difficult to model. Furthermore, clouds have competing effects on solar and terrestrial radiation. Increases in clouds increase reflected sunlight (a cooling effect) but also increase the greenhouse effect (a warming effect). The net effect of clouds at a given location depends the kind of clouds (stratus, cumulus etc.), their distribution in the vertical and on which radiative effect dominates.

Not only is it difficult to correctly represent clouds in climate models, but estimating how clouds and their radiative effects will change with global warming (i.e., the cloud feedback) is very difficult. Other physical feedbacks have more obvious links between temperature and the climate variable. For example, we expect and have strong evidence for the increase in water vapor in a warmer climate due to the increased saturation specific humidity, or the reduced reflection of sunlight due to the melting of snow and ice at higher temperature. However, there isn’t a simple thermodynamic relationship between temperature and cloud amount, and the complexities in the radiative impacts of clouds mean that an increase in clouds in one location may result in net heating, but would correspond to a cooling elsewhere. Thus, most of the uncertainty in the response of climate models to increases in CO2 is due to the uncertainty of the cloud feedback.

So how cool is it then that the recent paper by Fasullo and Trenberth estimates the net climate sensitivity without getting into the details of the cloud feedback then? Quite cool.
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References

  1. J.T. Fasullo, and K.E. Trenberth, "A Less Cloudy Future: The Role of Subtropical Subsidence in Climate Sensitivity", Science, vol. 338, pp. 792-794, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1227465

On sensitivity: Part I

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Climate sensitivity is a perennial topic here, so the multiple new papers and discussions around the issue, each with different perspectives, are worth discussing. Since this can be a complicated topic, I’ll focus in this post on the credible work being published. There’ll be a second part from Karen Shell, and in a follow-on post I’ll comment on some of the recent games being played in and around the Wall Street Journal op-ed pages.

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Responses to volcanoes in tree rings and models

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Houston, we have a problem.

Admittedly, not a huge problem and not one that most people, or even most climatologists, are particularly fascinated by, but one which threads together many topics (climate models, tree rings, paleo-climate) which have been highlighted here in the past. The problem is that we have good evidence in the ice core records for very large tropical eruptions over the last 1000 years – in particular the eruptions in 1258/1259, 1452 and 1809 to 1815 – but for which many paleo-reconstructions barely show a blip in temperature. Models, in attempting to simulate this period, show varied but generally larger (and sometimes much larger) responses. The differences are significant enough to have prompted a few people to try and look into why this mismatch is occurring.

Whenever there is a mismatch between model and observation, there are, roughly speaking, at least three (non-exclusive) possibilities: the model is wrong, the observational data are wrong or the comparison is not like-with-like. There have been many examples of resolved mismatches in each category so all possibilities need to be looked at.

As described in a previous post earlier this year, Mann et al., 2012 (pdf), postulated that for extreme volcanoes, the cooling would be sufficient to saturate the growth response, and that some trees might `skip´ a ring for that year leading to a slight slippage in tree-ring dating, a potential smearing of the composite chronologies, and a further underestimate of the cooling in tree-ring based large-scale reconstructions.

This hypothesis has now been challenged by a group of authors in a comment (Anchukaitis et al.) (pdf, SI, code), who focus on the appropriateness of the tree ring growth model and the spatial pattern the volcanic climate responses. The Mann et al. response (pdf, SI) presents some further modeling and 19th century observational data in support of the original hypothesis.

Of course, there are still two other possibilities to consider. First, the models may have an excessive response. This could be due to either models responding excessively to the correct forcing, or could be related to an excessive forcing itself. There are indeed some important uncertainties in estimating the history of volcanic forcing – which involves inferring a stratospheric aerosol load (and effective radius of the particles and their distribution) from a network of sulphate peaks in ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica. For example, the forcing for the big eruption around 1453 differs by a factor of 2 in the inferred forcing (-12 W/m2 and -5.4 W/m2) in the two estimates proposed for the recent model-intercomparison (Schmidt et al., 2012). Note too that the details of how aerosols are implemented in any specific model can also make a difference to the forcing, and there are many (as yet untested) assumptions built into the forcing reconstructions.

It is also conceivable that climate models overreact to volcanic forcing – however, excellent matches to the Pinatubo response in temperature, radiative anomalies, water vapour and dynamic responses, where we know the volcanic aerosol load well, make that tricky to support (Hansen et al, 2007) (pdf, SI). (As an aside, the suggestion in this paper that the response to Krakatoa (1883) was underpredicted by the historical SST fields was partially vindicated by the results from HadSST3 which showed substantially more cooling).

The third possibility is that some tree-ring reconstructions can’t be easily compared to simple temperature averages from the models. As both the original paper and the comment suggests, there are important effects from memory from previous years in ring widths and, potentially, increases in diffuse light post-eruption promoting growth spurts. This needs to be assessed using more sophisticated forward models for tree ring growth applied to the models’ output – a feature in both the Mann et al, and Anchukaitis et al. approaches. More work is likely needed on this, and using the wider variety of model experiments coming out of CMIP5/PMIP3.

There is clearly potential for these competing hypotheses to get sorted out. Information from newly-digitised old instrumental records in the early 19th Century such as shipping records for the East India Company (Brohan et al, 2012), doesn’t support the largest modelled responses to Tambora (1815), but does suggest a response larger and more defined than that seen in some reconstructions. However, other 19th Century temperature compilations such Berkeley Earth show larger responses to Tambora – though there are spatial sampling issues there as well. There is also the potential for non-tree ring based reconstructions to provide independent confirmation of the magnitude of the response.

So while neither of the latest comments and responses provide a definitive answer to the principal problem, there is certainly lots of scope for extended and (hopefully) productive discussions.

References

  1. M.E. Mann, J.D. Fuentes, and S. Rutherford, "Underestimation of volcanic cooling in tree-ring-based reconstructions of hemispheric temperatures", Nature Geoscience, vol. 5, pp. 202-205, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1394
  2. K.J. Anchukaitis, P. Breitenmoser, K.R. Briffa, A. Buchwal, U. Büntgen, E.R. Cook, R.D. D'Arrigo, J. Esper, M.N. Evans, D. Frank, H. Grudd, B.E. Gunnarson, M.K. Hughes, A.V. Kirdyanov, C. Körner, P.J. Krusic, B. Luckman, T.M. Melvin, M.W. Salzer, A.V. Shashkin, C. Timmreck, E.A. Vaganov, and R.J.S. Wilson, "Tree rings and volcanic cooling", Nature Geoscience, vol. 5, pp. 836-837, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1645
  3. M.E. Mann, J.D. Fuentes, and S. Rutherford, "Reply to 'Tree rings and volcanic cooling'", Nature Geoscience, vol. 5, pp. 837-838, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1646
  4. G.A. Schmidt, J.H. Jungclaus, C.M. Ammann, E. Bard, P. Braconnot, T.J. Crowley, G. Delaygue, F. Joos, N.A. Krivova, R. Muscheler, B.L. Otto-Bliesner, J. Pongratz, D.T. Shindell, S.K. Solanki, F. Steinhilber, and L.E.A. Vieira, "Climate forcing reconstructions for use in PMIP simulations of the Last Millennium (v1.1)", Geoscientific Model Development, vol. 5, pp. 185-191, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/gmd-5-185-2012
  5. J. Hansen, M. Sato, R. Ruedy, P. Kharecha, A. Lacis, R. Miller, L. Nazarenko, K. Lo, G.A. Schmidt, G. Russell, I. Aleinov, S. Bauer, E. Baum, B. Cairns, V. Canuto, M. Chandler, Y. Cheng, A. Cohen, A. Del Genio, G. Faluvegi, E. Fleming, A. Friend, T. Hall, C. Jackman, J. Jonas, M. Kelley, N.Y. Kiang, D. Koch, G. Labow, J. Lerner, S. Menon, T. Novakov, V. Oinas, J. Perlwitz, J. Perlwitz, D. Rind, A. Romanou, R. Schmunk, D. Shindell, P. Stone, S. Sun, D. Streets, N. Tausnev, D. Thresher, N. Unger, M. Yao, and S. Zhang, "Climate simulations for 1880–2003 with GISS modelE", Climate Dynamics, vol. 29, pp. 661-696, 2007. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00382-007-0255-8
  6. P. Brohan, R. Allan, E. Freeman, D. Wheeler, C. Wilkinson, and F. Williamson, "Constraining the temperature history of the past millennium using early instrumental observations", Climate of the Past, vol. 8, pp. 1551-1563, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/cp-8-1551-2012