WATER VAPOR AND THE DYNAMICS OF CLIMATE CHANGES
By Tapio Schneider, P. O’Gorman, X. Levine. 2009
506 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Water vapor is not only Earth's dominant greenhouse gas. Through the release of latent heat when it condenses, it also plays an active role in dynamic processes that shape the global circulation of the atmosphere and thus climate. Here we present an overview of how latent heat release affects atmosphere dynamics in a broad range of climates, ranging from extremely cold to extremely warm. Contrary to widely held beliefs, atmospheric circulation statistics can change nonmonotonically with global‐mean surface temperature, in part because of dynamic effects of water vapor. For example, the strengths of the tropical Hadley circulation and of zonally asymmetric tropical circulations, as well as the kinetic energy of extratropical baroclinic eddies, can be lower than they presently are both in much warmer climates and in much colder climates. We discuss how latent heat release is implicated in such circulation changes, particularly through its effect on the atmospheric static stability, and we illustrate the circulation changes through simulations with an idealized general circulation model. This allows us to explore a continuum of climates, to constrain macroscopic laws governing this climatic continuum, and to place past and possible future climate changes in a broader context.
Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e25ac89a37623205a13a224b075e29f1bbf9a1ef
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Citations in the corpus
- Response of the large‐scale structure of the atmosphere to global warming (2015, background): “The above mechanism is far from being so compelling as to be definitive, as also noted in the review by Schneider et al. (2010), and other plausible arguments may be made.”
- The role of latent heating in atmospheric blocking dynamics: a global climatology (2019, background): “Furthermore, the importance of LH can be expected to vary in a warmer future climate due to increased atmospheric moisture content (Schneider et al. 2010) and changes in mid-latitude jetstream variability (Barnes and Screen 2015).”
- Understanding Decreases in Land Relative Humidity with Global Warming: Conceptual Model and GCM Simulations (2016, methodology): “Schneider et al. (2010) used this approach, together with an energetic estimate for changes in evaporation, to yield an increase in ocean relative humidity with warming of order 1% K 2 1 (here and throughout this paper, relative humidity changes are expressed as absolute rather than fractional…”
- Energetic Constraints on Precipitation Under Climate Change (2012, background): “, Held and Soden 2006), although, again, the required magnitude of the circulation change is difficult to estimate from first principles (Schneider et al. 2010).”
- Tropospheric water vapor, convection, and climate (2010, background): “It is primarily the increase in upper tropospheric humidity accompanying warming, rather than, say, CO2 increases, that is expected to shift the profile of tropospheric radiative cooling upward and therefore also the vertical extent of convective overturning in the warmer climate [Hartmann and Larso”