Speaker
Description
The Earth Energy Budget (EEB) at the Top Of the Atmosphere (TOA) is the net amount of energy that enters or leaves the Earth climate system. It is driven by the balance between the incoming solar radiation (in the shortwave) and the radiation leaving the climate system, the reflected solar radiation and the thermal radiation emitted by the Earth-atmosphere system (in the longwave, also known as Outgoing Longwave Radiation (OLR)). The EEB is a key property to fully understand how the Earth climate system works. It contains the signature of processes (such as natural or anthropogenic forcings) related to climate change, in addition to the ones related to internal climate variability. The El Niño - Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is one of the most important internal variability modes of the Earth climate system. ENSO perturbs the OLR by modifying Sea Surface Temperatures (SSTs) and shifting tropical convective zones. Studying the mechanisms behind this response is key to understand the evolution of the OLR in observations and climate models.
The aim of this work is to investigate how climate models participating to the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 6 (CMIP6) (Eyring et al. (2016)) reproduce ENSO driven variability. The relationship between clear-sky OLR in the tropical ocean and ENSO is examined. Climate models are evaluated against the Clouds and Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) (Loeb et al. (2018)). Moreover, in anticipation of the real data from the Far-infared Outgoing Radiation Understanding and Monitoring (FORUM) mission, a clear-sky fluxes climatology of the Infrared Atmospheric Sounder Interferometer (IASI) (Whitburn et al. (2020)) is also used to study the spectrally resolved OLR response to ENSO.
References:
- LOEB, Norman G., et al. Clouds and the earth’s radiant energy system (CERES) energy balanced and filled (EBAF) top-of-atmosphere (TOA) edition-4.0 data product. Journal of Climate, 2018, 31.2: 895-918.
- WHITBURN, Simon, et al. Spectrally resolved fluxes from IASI data: Retrieval algorithm for clear-sky measurements. Journal of Climate, 2020, 33.16: 6971-6988.
- EYRING, Veronika, et al. Overview of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) experimental design and organization. Geoscientific Model Development, 2016, 9.5: 1937-1958.
