Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
of sufficient magnitude and duration to trigger significant effects from slow
climate system feedbacks.
3.3 TRANSIENT CLIMATE RESPONSE AND SENSITIVITY
The climate system responds differently to perturbations in radiative
forcing on different time scales. It is of special importance to carefully
distinguish between the “equilibrium climate sensitivity” and the “transient
climate response.” The concept of equilibrium climate sensitivity and its
alternative definitions have been discussed in Section 3.2. The transient
climate response is of special relevance for climate change over the 20th
and 21st centuries.
The transient climate response, or TCR, is traditionally defined in a
model using a particular experiment in which the atmospheric CO
2
concen-
tration is increased at the rate of 1% per year. The increase in global mean
temperature in a 20-year period centered at the time of doubling (year 70) is
defined as the TCR (Cubasch, 2001). The upper tens of meters of the ocean,
the atmosphere, and the land surface are all strongly coupled to each other
on time scales greater than a decade, and are expected to warm coherently
with a well-defined spatial pattern during a period of increasing radiative
forcing. (This pattern is discussed in Section 4.1.) On these time scales, the
rate of change of the heat stored in oceanic surface layers, as well as the
atmosphere and land surface, can be ignored to first approximation, and we
can think of global mean temperature as determined by the energy balance
between the radiative forcing
F
, the change in the radiative flux at the top
of the atmosphere
U
, and the flux of energy
D
into the deeper layers of the
ocean that are far from equilibrium:
F
=
U
+
D
.
On long enough times scales, as long as a millennium by some estimates
(e.g., Stouffer, 2004), the heat flux into the deep ocean
D
tends to zero, and
the climate response approaches its equilibrium value determined by the
balance between
F
and
U
. On the shorter times scales at which the changes
in the deep ocean are still small, the heat uptake grows in time roughly
proportional to the global mean temperature perturbation,
D
=
γ
T
(Gregory
and Mitchell, 1997; Raper et al., 2002; Dufresne and Bony, 2008), similar
to the more familiar linear approximation to the radiative flux response,
U
=
β
T
. The implication is that on these time scales we can use the simple
approximation
T
=
F
/(
β
+
γ
).
This approximation is useful on a limited range of time scales—longer
than a decade but shorter than the centuries required for the heat uptake
by the oceans to begin to saturate (Gregory and Forster, 2008; Held et al.,
