Clouds can warm or cool the planet’s surface, a radiative effect that contributes greatly to the global energy budget and can be altered by human-caused pollution. The Southern Ocean is far from human pollution but subject to abundant marine gases and aerosols. It is about 80% covered by clouds.
Researchers are trying to figure out how this body of water and relationship with clouds contribute to the world’s changing climate. They are now one step closer after identifying compensation errors in widely used climate model protocols known as CMIP6.
“Cloud and radiation biases over the Southern Ocean have been a long-lasting problem in the past generations of global climate models,” said author Yuan Wang. “After the latest CMIP6 models were released, we were anxious to see how they performed and whether the old problems were still there.”
CMIP6 is a project of the World Climate Research Program which allows for the assessment of climate models to reveal how they compare to each other and real-world data.
“This paper emphasizes compensating errors in the cloud physical properties in spite of overall improvement of radiation simulation over the Southern Ocean,” Wang explained. “With space satellite observations, we are able to quantify those errors in the simulated cloud microphysical properties, including cloud fraction, cloud water content, cloud droplet size and more, and further reveal how each contributes to the total bias in the cloud radiative effect.”
https://phys.org/news/2022-09-climate-clouded-scientific-biases.html