How much do tropical anvil clouds shrink as Earth warms?
In plain words
High, thin anvil-shaped clouds spread out from tropical thunderstorms and trap heat. If they shrink with warming, more heat escapes to space, a cooling effect called the 'iris' hypothesis, but its size is debated.
Precise statement
The tropical anvil cloud area feedback was assessed at about $-2 \times 10^{2} \pm 2 \times 10^{2}\,\mathrm{erg}/(\mathrm{s}\,\mathrm{cm}^2\,\mathrm{K})$ (Sherwood and coauthors 2020), while the iris hypothesis (Lindzen and coauthors 2001) argued for a much more negative value. Determine the global anvil-area feedback and its mechanism (stability iris, changes in convective aggregation, anvil lifetime and microphysics) with uncertainty below about $10^{2}\,\mathrm{erg}/(\mathrm{s}\,\mathrm{cm}^2\,\mathrm{K})$.
What would settle it
Cloud-resolving simulations under warming with resolved anvil microphysics, validated against satellite relations between anvil area, cloud radiative effect and surface temperature.
Status in the literature
Unverified note: it names recent work and was partly written without a live literature search; it awaits a check by an editor.
McKim, Bony and Dufresne (Nature Geoscience 2024, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-024-01414-4) argued that physical and observational constraints imply a weak anvil-area feedback.
Parent problems
- Special case of What is Earth's equilibrium climate sensitivity? · open · from revision 1 The parent was revised since revision 1: it now states another question.
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