Year: 2024
Type: preprint
Abstract: Since the 5th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (AR5) an extended concept of the energetic analysis of climate change including forcings, feedbacks and adjustment processes has become widely adopted. Adjustments are defined as processes that occur in response to the introduction of a climate forcing agent, but that are independent of global-mean surface temperature changes. Most considered are the adjustments that impact the Earth energy budget and strengthen or weaken the instantaneous radiative forcing due to the forcing agent. Some adjustment mechanisms also impact other aspects of climate not related to the Earth radiation budget. Since AR5 and a following description by Sherwood et al. (2015), much research on adjustments has been performed and is reviewed here. We classify the adjustment mechanisms into six main categories, and discuss methods of quantifying these adjustments in terms of their potentials, shortcomings and practicality. We furthermore describe aspects of adjustments that act beyond the energetic framework, and we propose new ideas to observe adjustments or to make use of observations to constrain their representation in models. Altogether, the problem of adjustments is now on a robust scientific footing, and better quantification and observational constraint is possible. This allows for improvements in understanding and quantifying climate change.
Authors: Johannes Quaas, Timothy Andrews, Nicolas Bellouin, Karoline Block, Olivier Boucher, Paulo Ceppi, Guy Dagan, Sabine Doktorowski, Hannah Marie Eichholz, Piers Forster, Tom Goren, Edward Gryspeerdt, Øivind Hodnebrog, Hailing Jia, Ryan Kramer, Charlotte Lange, Amanda C Maycock, Johannes Mülmenstädt, Gunnar Myhre, Fiona M O'connor, Robert Pincus, Bjørn Hallvard Samset, Fabian Senf, Keith P Shine, Chris Smith, Camilla Weum Stjern, Toshihiko Takemura, Velle Toll, Casey J Wall
Institutions: Leipzig University, Met Office, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Sorbonne Université, Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace, University of Reading, Imperial College London, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, University of Leeds, Bar-Ilan University, CICERO Center for International Climate Research, Space Research Organisation Netherlands, Goddard Space Flight Center, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA Earth Science, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, University of Exeter, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Kyushu University, University of Tartu, University of Oslo
Language: English
Subfield: Global and Planetary Change
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
SDG: Climate action
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W4400770622