Atmospheric cloud-radiative heating in CMIP6 and observations and its response to surface warming

Voigt, Aiko; North, Stefanie; Gasparini, Blaž; Ham, Seung-Hee

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-24-9749-2024

Articles | Volume 24, issue 17

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-24-9749-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-24-9749-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 24, issue 17

Research article

|

04 Sep 2024

Research article |

| 04 Sep 2024

Atmospheric cloud-radiative heating in CMIP6 and observations and its response to surface warming

Aiko Voigt, Stefanie North, Blaž Gasparini, and Seung-Hee Ham

Data sets

CMIP6 postprocessed data for Voigt et al., ACP - Part 1 Aiko Voigt https://doi.org/10.25365/phaidra.528_01

CMIP6 postprocessed data for Voigt et al., ACP - Part 2 Aiko Voigt https://doi.org/10.25365/phaidra.528_02

Data collection for Voigt et al., ACP Aiko Voigt https://doi.org/10.25365/phaidra.528

Main code repository for Voigt et al., ACP Aiko Voigt https://doi.org/10.25365/phaidra.528_04

Scripts for CloudSat/Calipso 2B-FLXHR-LIDAR data Aiko Voigt https://doi.org/10.25365/phaidra.528_03

Short summary

Clouds shape weather and climate by interacting with photons, which changes temperatures within the atmosphere. We assess how well CMIP6 climate models capture this radiative heating by clouds within the atmosphere. While we find large differences among models, especially in cold regions of the atmosphere with abundant ice clouds, we also demonstrate that physical understanding allows us to predict the response of clouds and their radiative heating near the tropopause to climate change.