How strongly do low marine clouds amplify warming? · revision history

Revision 2

Accepted · core change · record

Changes against revision 1:

Title
How strongly do low marine clouds amplify warming?
Plain
Low clouds over the oceans reflect sunlight and cool the planet. If warming thins them, the planet absorbs more sunlight and warms further, and how much is the largest single uncertainty.
Precise · changed · core
Revision 1: Determine the global low-cloud feedback parameter (stratocumulus and trade cumulus over the subtropical oceans) in erg/(s cm^2 K); current assessments center near $+2e2\,\mathrm{erg}/(\mathrm{s}\,\mathrm{cm}^{2}\,\mathrm{K})$ with large uncertainty. An answer is a value with uncertainty below about $1e2\,\mathrm{erg}/(\mathrm{s}\,\mathrm{cm}^{2}\,\mathrm{K})$ supported by large-eddy simulations and observed cloud-controlling-factor relations.
Revision 2: Determine the global low-cloud feedback parameter (stratocumulus and trade cumulus over the subtropical oceans) in $\mathrm{erg}/(\mathrm{s}\,\mathrm{cm}^{2}\,\mathrm{K})$; current assessments center near $+2 \times 10^{2}\,\mathrm{erg}/(\mathrm{s}\,\mathrm{cm}^{2}\,\mathrm{K})$ with large uncertainty. An answer is a value with uncertainty below about $10^{2}\,\mathrm{erg}/(\mathrm{s}\,\mathrm{cm}^{2}\,\mathrm{K})$ supported by large-eddy simulations and observed cloud-controlling-factor relations.
Settled by
Large-eddy simulations across regimes validated by field campaigns and satellite cloud-controlling-factor analyses.
Kind
well-posed
Answer type
value
References
(empty)
Literature status
partially-resolved
Status note
Field data from the 2020 EUREC4A campaign were interpreted (Vogel and coauthors, Nature 2022) as indicating a weak trade-cumulus feedback; stratocumulus feedback remains uncertain.
Posed since
(empty)

Decisions