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Abstract Global radiative feedbacks have been found to vary in global climate model (GCM) simulations. Atmospheric GCMs (AGCMs) driven with historical patterns of sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and sea ice concentrations produce radiative feedbacks that trend toward more negative values, implying low climate sensitivity, over recent decades. Freely evolving coupled GCMs driven by increasing CO2 produce radiative feedbacks that trend toward more positive values, implying increasing climate sensitivity, in the future. While this time variation in feedbacks has been linked to evolving SST patterns, the role of particular regions has not been quantified. Here, a Green’s function is derived from a suite of simulations within an AGCM (NCAR’s CAM4), allowing an attribution of global feedback changes to surface warming in each region. The results highlight the radiative response to surface warming in ascent regions of the western tropical Pacific as the dominant control on global radiative feedback changes. Historical warming from the 1950s to 2000s preferentially occurred in the western Pacific, yielding a strong global outgoing radiative response at the top of the atmosphere (TOA) and thus a strongly negative global feedback. Long-term warming in coupled GCMs occurs preferentially in tropical descent regions and in high latitudes, where surface warming yields small global TOA radiation change but large global surface air temperature change, and thus a less-negative global feedback. These results illuminate the importance of determining mechanisms of warm pool warming for understanding how feedbacks have varied historically and will evolve in the future.
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This content will become publicly available on May 30, 2026
A fluctuation-dissipation theorem perspective on radiative responses to temperature perturbations
Abstract Radiative forcing drives warming in the Earth system, leading to changes in sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and associated radiative feedbacks. The link between changes in the top-of-the-atmosphere (TOA) net radiative flux and SST patterns, known as the “pattern effect”, is typically diagnosed by studying the response of atmosphere-only models to SST perturbations. In this work, we diagnose the pattern effect through response theory, by performing idealized warming perturbation experiments from unperturbed data alone. First, by studying the response at short time scales, where the response is dominated by atmospheric variability, we recover results that agree with the literature. Second, by extending the framework to longer time scales, we capture coupled interactions between the slow ocean component and the atmosphere, yielding a novel “sensitivity map” quantifying the response of the net radiative flux to SST perturbations in the coupled system. Here, feedbacks are captured by a spatiotemporal response operator, rather than time-independent maps as in traditional studies. Both formulations skillfully reconstruct changes in externally forced simulations and provide practical strategies for climate studies. The key distinction lies in their perspectives on climate feedbacks. The first formulation, closely aligned with prediction tasks, follows the traditional view in which slow variables, such as SSTs, exert a one-way influence on fast variables. The second formulation broadens this perspective by incorporating spatiotemporal interactions across state variables. This alternative approach explores how localized SST perturbations can alter the coupled dynamics, leading to temperature changes in remote areas and further impacting the radiative fluxes at later times.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2048576
- PAR ID:
- 10608226
- Publisher / Repository:
- American Meteorological Society
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Climate
- ISSN:
- 0894-8755
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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