Vertical structure of warming consistent with an upward shift in the middle and upper troposphere
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O'Gorman_Vertical structure.pdf
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Author(s)
Singh, Martin Simran
O'Gorman, Paul
Date Issued
May 2013
Journal
Geophysical Research Letters
Publisher
American Geophysical Union (AGU)
Citation
O’Gorman, Paul A., and Martin S. Singh. “Vertical Structure of Warming Consistent with an Upward Shift in the Middle and Upper Troposphere.” Geophys. Res. Lett. 40, no. 9 (May 16, 2013): 1838–1842. Copyright © 2013 American Geophysical Union
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Warming in climate-change simulations reaches a local maximum in the tropical upper troposphere as expected from moist-adiabatic lapse rates. But the structure of warming varies between models and differs substantially from moist adiabatic in the extratropics. Here, we relate the vertical profile of warming to the climatological temperature profile using the vertical-shift transformation (VST). The VST captures much of the intermodel scatter in the ratio of upper- to middle-tropospheric warming in both the extratropics and tropics of simulations from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 5 (CMIP5). Application of the VST to observed climatological temperatures yields warming ratios that are in the range of what is obtained from the model climatological temperatures, although biases in some model climatologies lead to substantial errors when shifted upward. Radiosonde temperature trends are consistent with an upward shift in recent decades in the Northern Hemisphere, with less-robust results in the Southern Hemisphere.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1002/grl.50328
