Articles | Volume 23, issue 15
https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-23-8749-2023
https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-23-8749-2023
Research article
 | 
08 Aug 2023
Research article |  | 08 Aug 2023

Identifying climate model structural inconsistencies allows for tight constraint of aerosol radiative forcing

Leighton A. Regayre, Lucia Deaconu, Daniel P. Grosvenor, David M. H. Sexton, Christopher Symonds, Tom Langton, Duncan Watson-Paris, Jane P. Mulcahy, Kirsty J. Pringle, Mark Richardson, Jill S. Johnson, John W. Rostron, Hamish Gordon, Grenville Lister, Philip Stier, and Ken S. Carslaw

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Cited articles

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Short summary
Aerosol forcing of Earth’s energy balance has persisted as a major cause of uncertainty in climate simulations over generations of climate model development. We show that structural deficiencies in a climate model are exposed by comprehensively exploring parametric uncertainty and that these deficiencies limit how much the model uncertainty can be reduced through observational constraint. This provides a future pathway towards building models with greater physical realism and lower uncertainty.
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