Climate Feedbacks Derived From Spatial Gradients in Recent Climatology

Goodwin, P ORCID: 0000-0002-2575-8948, Williams, RG ORCID: 0000-0002-3180-7558, Ceppi, P ORCID: 0000-0002-3754-3506 and Cael, BB ORCID: 0000-0003-1317-5718 (2025) Climate Feedbacks Derived From Spatial Gradients in Recent Climatology Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres, 130 (12). ISSN 2169-897X, 2169-8996

Access the full-text of this item by clicking on the Open Access link.

Abstract

Climate feedbacks, including Planck, surface albedo, water vapor-lapse rate (WVLR) and cloud feedbacks, determine how much surface temperatures will eventually warm to balance anthropogenic radiative forcing. Climate feedbacks remain difficult to constrain directly from temporal variation in observed surface warming and radiation budgets due to the pattern effect and low signal-to-noise ratio, with only order 1°C historic rise in surface temperatures and high uncertainty in aerosol radiative forcing. This study presents a new method to analyze climate feedbacks from observations by empirically fitting simplified reduced-physics relations for outgoing radiation at the top of the atmosphere (TOA) to observed spatial variation in climate properties and radiation budgets. Spatial variations in TOA outgoing radiation are dominated by the dependence on surface temperature: around 91% of the spatial variation in clear sky albedo, and 77% of spatial variation in clear sky TOA outgoing longwave radiation, is functionally explained by variation in surface temperatures. These simplified and observationally constrained relations are then differentiated with respect to spatial contrasts in surface temperature to reveal the Planck, fixed-cloud albedo ((Formula presented.)) and WVLR ((Formula presented.)) climate feedbacks spatially for both clear sky and all sky conditions. The resulting global all sky climate feedback values are (Formula presented.) = 1.28 (1.13–1.45 at 66%) Wm⁻²K⁻¹, and (Formula presented.) = 0.64 (0.53–0.74) Wm⁻² for the period 2003–2023, reducing to 0.35 (0.29–0.41) Wm⁻²K⁻¹ under 4°C warming after cryosphere retreat. Our findings agree well with complex Earth system model evaluations based on temporal climate perturbations, and our approach is complementary.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	climate feedback, climate change
Divisions:	Faculty of Science & Engineering Faculty of Science & Engineering > School of Environmental Sciences
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	07 Jul 2025 07:29
Last Modified:	28 Feb 2026 11:51
DOI:	10.1029/2024JD043186
Open Access URL:	https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.102...
Related Websites:	Author Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3193566
Disclaimer:	The University of Liverpool is not responsible for content contained on other websites from links within repository metadata. Please contact us if you notice anything that appears incorrect or inappropriate.