Journal ArticleDOI
Water vapor feedback and global warming
Isaac M. Held,Brian J. Soden +1 more
- Vol. 25, pp 441-475
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In this article, the authors describe the background behind the prevailing view on water vapor feedback and some of the arguments raised by its critics, and attempt to explain why these arguments have not modified the consensus within the climate research community.Abstract:
■ Abstract Water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas, the most important gaseous source of infrared opacity in the atmosphere. As the concentrations of other greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, increase because of human activity, it is centrally important to predict how the water vapor distribution will be affected. To the extent that water vapor concentrations increase in a warmer world, the climatic effects of the other greenhouse gases will be amplified. Models of the Earth’s climate indicate that this is an important positive feedback that increases the sensitivity of surface temperatures to carbon dioxide by nearly a factor of two when considered in isolation from other feedbacks, and possibly by as much as a factor of three or more when interactions with other feedbacks are considered. Critics of this consensus have attempted to provide reasons why modeling results are overestimating the strength of this feedback. Our uncertainty concerning climate sensitivity is disturbing. The range most often quoted for the equilibrium global mean surface temperature response to a doubling of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere is 1.5C to 4.5C. If the Earth lies near the upper bound of this sensitivity range, climate changes in the twenty-first century will be profound. The range in sensitivity is primarily due to differing assumptions about how the Earth’s cloud distribution is maintained; all the models on which these estimates are based possess strong water vapor feedback. If this feedback is, in fact, substantially weaker than predicted in current models, sensitivities in the upper half of this range would be much less likely, a conclusion that would clearly have important policy implications. In this review, we describe the background behind the prevailing view on water vapor feedback and some of the arguments raised by its critics, and attempt to explain why these arguments have not modified the consensus within the climate research community.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Robust Responses of the Hydrological Cycle to Global Warming
Isaac M. Held,Brian J. Soden +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined some aspects of the hydrological cycle that are robust across the models, including the decrease in convective mass fluxes, the increase in horizontal moisture transport, the associated enhancement of the pattern of evaporation minus precipitation and its temporal variance, and decrease in the horizontal sensible heat transport in the extratropics.
Journal ArticleDOI
Evidence for intensification of the global water cycle: Review and synthesis
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors review the current state of science regarding historical trends in hydrologic variables, including precipitation, runoff, tropospheric water vapor, soil moisture, glacier mass balance, evaporation and growing season length.
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Effect of Climate Change on Air Quality
TL;DR: This article found that climate change alone will increase summertime surface ozone in polluted regions by 1-10 ppb over the coming decades, with the largest effects in urban areas and during pollution episodes.
Journal ArticleDOI
Projected changes in drought occurrence under future global warming from multi-model, multi-scenario, IPCC AR4 simulations
Justin Sheffield,Eric F. Wood +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors analyzed changes in drought occurrence using soil moisture data for the SRES B1, A1B and A2 future climate scenarios relative to the PICNTRL pre-industrial control and 20C3M twen-tieth century simulations from eight AOGCMs that participated in the IPCC AR4.
Journal ArticleDOI
An Assessment of Climate Feedbacks in Coupled Ocean–Atmosphere Models
Brian J. Soden,Isaac M. Held +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the climate feedbacks in coupled ocean-atmosphere models are compared using a coordinated set of twenty-first-century climate change experiments, and it is found that water vapor is the largest positive feedback in all models and its strength is consistent with that expected from constant relative humidity changes in the water vapor mixing ratio.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
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Journal ArticleDOI
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