Total aerosol effect: radiative forcing or radiative flux perturbation?

By Ulrike Lohmann, Leon D. Rotstayn, T. Storelvmo, A. Jones, S. Menon, Johannes Quaas, A. Ekman, D. Koch, R. Ruedy. 2009

218 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract. Uncertainties in aerosol radiative forcings, especially those associated with clouds, contribute to a large extent to uncertainties in the total anthropogenic forcing. The interaction of aerosols with clouds and radiation introduces feedbacks which can affect the rate of precipitation formation. In former assessments of aerosol radiative forcings, these effects have not been quantified. Also, with global aerosol-climate models simulating interactively aerosols and cloud microphysical properties, a quantification of the aerosol forcings in the traditional way is difficult to define properly. Here we argue that fast feedbacks should be included because they act quickly compared with the time scale of global warming. We show that for different forcing agents (aerosols and greenhouse gases) the radiative forcings as traditionally defined agree rather well with estimates from a method, here referred to as radiative flux perturbations (RFP), that takes these fast feedbacks and interactions into account. Based on our results, we recommend RFP as a valid option to compare different forcing agents, and to compare the effects of particular forcing agents in different models.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bb50784a294eed19625b2555eb792947cef465c5

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In Atmospheric Science

In Global and Planetary Change

Citations in the corpus

The scale problem in quantifying aerosol indirect effects (2011, background): “The sign of this forcing is agreed to be negative but a large uncertainty in the estimated magnitude has persisted through time (Lohmann et al., 2010).”
Attribution of the present-day total greenhouse effect (2010, background): “The internal changes are sometimes referred to as “fast feedbacks” to distinguish them from “slow feedback” processes (such as vegetation or carbon cycle changes) that are not included within our modeled system, though since many fast feedbacks associated with atmospheric chemistry or aerosols are a”
Radiative forcing in the ACCMIP historical and future climate simulations (2013, background): “Though clearly it would be preferable to use the same metric for all agents, studies to date suggest that for both WMGHG and ozone ERF and RF values are probably within 5 % (Hansen et al., 2005; Andrews and Forster, 2008; Lohmann et al., 2010).”