Response of stratospheric water vapour to warming constrained by satellite observations.

Autor: Nowack P; Climatic Research Unit, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK.; Grantham Institute and Department of Physics, Imperial College London, London, UK.; Data Science Institute, Imperial College London, London, UK.; Institute of Theoretical Informatics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany., Ceppi P; Grantham Institute and Department of Physics, Imperial College London, London, UK., Davis SM; NOAA Chemical Sciences Laboratory, Boulder, CO USA., Chiodo G; Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland., Ball W; Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.; Department of Geoscience and Remote Sensing, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands.; Physikalisch-Meteorologisches Observatorium Davos World Radiation Centre, Davos, Switzerland., Diallo MA; Institute of Energy and Climate Research, Stratosphere (IEK-7), Forschungszentrum Jülich, Jülich, Germany., Hassler B; Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR), Institut für Physik der Atmosphäre, Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany., Jia Y; NOAA Chemical Sciences Laboratory, Boulder, CO USA.; Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO USA., Keeble J; Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.; National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS), University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK., Joshi M; Climatic Research Unit, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Nature geoscience [Nat Geosci] 2023; Vol. 16 (7), pp. 577-583. Date of Electronic Publication: 2023 Jun 26.
DOI: 10.1038/s41561-023-01183-6
Abstrakt: Future increases in stratospheric water vapour risk amplifying climate change and slowing down the recovery of the ozone layer. However, state-of-the-art climate models strongly disagree on the magnitude of these increases under global warming. Uncertainty primarily arises from the complex processes leading to dehydration of air during its tropical ascent into the stratosphere. Here we derive an observational constraint on this longstanding uncertainty. We use a statistical-learning approach to infer historical co-variations between the atmospheric temperature structure and tropical lower stratospheric water vapour concentrations. For climate models, we demonstrate that these historically constrained relationships are highly predictive of the water vapour response to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide. We obtain an observationally constrained range for stratospheric water vapour changes per degree of global warming of 0.31 ± 0.39 ppmv K -1 . Across 61 climate models, we find that a large fraction of future model projections are inconsistent with observational evidence. In particular, frequently projected strong increases (>1 ppmv K -1 ) are highly unlikely. Our constraint represents a 50% decrease in the 95th percentile of the climate model uncertainty distribution, which has implications for surface warming, ozone recovery and the tropospheric circulation response under climate change.
Competing Interests: Competing interestsThe authors declare no competing interests.
(© The Author(s) 2023.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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