Simple equations clarify cloud climate conundrum

Phys.org  April 1, 2024 Changes in anvil clouds with warming remain a leading source of uncertainty in estimating Earth’s climate sensitivity. An international team of researchers (France, UK) developed a feedback analysis that decomposes changes in anvil clouds and creates testable hypotheses for refining their proposed uncertainty ranges with observations and theory. They derived a simple but quantitative expression for the anvil area feedback, which depended on the present-day measurable cloud radiative effects and the fractional change in anvil area with warming. Satellite observations suggested an anvil cloud radiative effect of about ±1 W m−2, which requires the fractional change in anvil […]