Publication Date:
2022-05-26
Description:
Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2019. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Geophysical Research Letters, 46(9), (2019):4894-4903, doi:10.1029/2019GL082015.
Description:
The largest contributor to the planetary energy imbalance is well‐mixed greenhouse gases (GHGs), which are partially offset by poorly mixed (and thus northern midlatitude dominated) anthropogenic aerosols (AAs). To isolate the effects of GHGs and AAs, we analyze data from the CMIP5 historical (i.e., all natural and anthropogenic forcing) and single forcing (GHG‐only and AA‐only) experiments. Over the duration of the historical experiment (1861–2005) excess heat uptake at the top of the atmosphere and ocean surface occurs almost exclusively in the Southern Hemisphere, with AAs canceling the influence of GHGs in the Northern Hemisphere. This interhemispheric asymmetry in surface heat uptake is eliminated by a northward oceanic transport of excess heat, as there is little hemispheric difference in historical ocean heat storage after accounting for ocean volume. Data from the 1pctCO2 and RCP 8.5 experiments suggests that the future storage of excess heat will be skewed toward the Northern Hemisphere oceans.
Description:
We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme's Working Group on Coupled Modelling, which is responsible for CMIP, and we thank the climate modeling groups for producing and making available their model output. CMIP data can be accessed at the ESGF website (https://esgfnode.llnl.gov/projects/esgfllnl/). For CMIP the U.S. Department of Energy's Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison provides coordinating support and led development of software infrastructure in partnership with the Global Organization for Earth System Science Portals. We also thank Paola Petrelli from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, for her assistance with downloading/managing the CMIP5 data archive at the National Computational Infrastructure.
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
Permalink
