CICERO Center for International Climate Research - Oslo, 0318, Oslo, Norway.
Met Office Hadley Centre, Devon, EX1 3PB, United Kingdom.
Nat Commun. 2018 May 15;9(1):1922. doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-04307-4.
Globally, latent heating associated with a change in precipitation is balanced by changes to atmospheric radiative cooling and sensible heat fluxes. Both components can be altered by climate forcing mechanisms and through climate feedbacks, but the impacts of climate forcing and feedbacks on sensible heat fluxes have received much less attention. Here we show, using a range of climate modelling results, that changes in sensible heat are the dominant contributor to the present global-mean precipitation change since preindustrial time, because the radiative impact of forcings and feedbacks approximately compensate. The model results show a dissimilar influence on sensible heat and precipitation from various drivers of climate change. Due to its strong atmospheric absorption, black carbon is found to influence the sensible heat very differently compared to other aerosols and greenhouse gases. Our results indicate that this is likely caused by differences in the impact on the lower tropospheric stability.
在全球范围内，降水变化引起的潜在加热与大气辐射冷却和感热通量的变化相平衡。这两个分量都可以通过气候强迫机制和气候反馈来改变，但气候强迫和反馈对感热通量的影响受到的关注要少得多。在这里，我们使用一系列气候模拟结果表明，感热的变化是导致工业化前以来全球平均降水变化的主要因素，因为强迫和反馈的辐射影响大致补偿。模型结果表明，不同的气候变化驱动因素对感热和降水的影响不同。由于其对大气的强烈吸收，黑碳与其他气溶胶和温室气体相比，对感热的影响非常不同。我们的结果表明，这可能是由于对低对流层稳定性的影响不同造成的。
