Tropospheric Warming Over The Past Two Decades

Benjamin D Santer; Susan Solomon; Frank J Wentz; Qiang Fu; Stephen Po-Chedley; Carl Mears; Jeffrey F Painter; Céline Bonfils

doi:10.1038/s41598-017-02520-7

Tropospheric Warming Over The Past Two Decades

Sci Rep. 2017 May 24;7(1):2336. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-02520-7.

Authors

Benjamin D Santer¹, Susan Solomon², Frank J Wentz³, Qiang Fu⁴, Stephen Po-Chedley⁵, Carl Mears³, Jeffrey F Painter⁵, Céline Bonfils⁵

Affiliations

¹ Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA, 94550, USA. santer1@llnl.gov.
² Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA.
³ Remote Sensing Systems, Santa Rosa, CA, 95401, USA.
⁴ Dept. of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 98195, USA.
⁵ Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA, 94550, USA.

Abstract

Satellite temperature measurements do not support the recent claim of a "leveling off of warming" over the past two decades. Tropospheric warming trends over recent 20-year periods are always significantly larger (at the 10% level or better) than model estimates of 20-year trends arising from natural internal variability. Over the full 38-year period of the satellite record, the separation between observed warming and internal variability estimates is even clearer. In two out of three recent satellite datasets, the tropospheric warming from 1979 to 2016 is unprecedented relative to internally generated temperature trends on the 38-year timescale.

Publication types

Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't