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Abstract Atmospheric heat transport (AHT) is an important piece of our climate system but has primarily been studied at monthly or longer time scales. We introduce a new method for calculating zonal-mean meridional AHT using instantaneous atmospheric fields. When time averaged, our calculations closely reproduce the climatological AHT used elsewhere in the literature to understand AHT and its trends on long time scales. In the extratropics, AHT convergence and atmospheric heating are strongly temporally correlated suggesting that AHT drives the vast majority of zonal-mean atmospheric temperature variability. Our AHT methodology separates AHT into two components (eddies and the mean meridional circulation) which we find are negatively correlated throughout most of the mid- to high latitudes. This negative correlation reduces the variance in the total AHT compared to eddy AHT. Last, we find that the temporal distribution of the total AHT at any given latitude is approximately symmetric. 

Abstract The influence of climate feedbacks on regional hydrological changes under warming is poorly understood. Here, a moist energy balance model (MEBM) with a Hadley Cell parameterization is used to isolate the influence of climate feedbacks on changes in zonal‐mean precipitation‐minus‐evaporation (P − E) under greenhouse‐gas forcing. It is shown that cloud feedbacks act to narrow bands of tropicalP − Eand increaseP − Ein the deep tropics. The surface‐albedo feedback shifts the location of maximum tropicalP − Eand increasesP − Ein the polar regions. The intermodel spread in theP − Echanges associated with feedbacks arises mainly from cloud feedbacks, with the lapse‐rate and surface‐albedo feedbacks playing important roles in the polar regions. TheP − Echange associated with cloud feedback locking in the MEBM is similar to that of a climate model with inactive cloud feedbacks. This work highlights the unique role that climate feedbacks play in causing deviations from the “wet‐gets‐wetter, dry‐gets‐drier” paradigm.