Climate sensitivity is a measure of how responsive the temperature of the climate system is to a change in the radiative forcing.
Although climate sensitivity is usually used in the context of radiative forcing by carbon dioxide, it is thought of as a general property of the climate system: the change in surface air temperature (ΔTs) following a unit change in radiative forcing (RF), and thus is expressed in units of °C/(W/m2). For this to be useful, the measure must be independent of the nature of the forcing (e.g. from greenhouse gases or solar variation); to first order this is indeed found to be so.
The climate sensitivity specifically due to CO2 is often expressed as the temperature change in °C associated with a doubling of the concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere.
For a coupled atmosphere-ocean global climate model the climate sensitivity is an emergent property: it is not a model parameter, but rather a result of a combination of model physics and parameters. By contrast, simpler energy-balance models may have climate sensitivity as an explicit parameter.
The terms represented in the equation relate radiative forcing of any cause to linear changes in global surface temperature change.
It is also possible to estimate climate sensitivity from observations; however, this is difficult due to uncertainties in the forcing and temperature histories.
Read more about Climate Sensitivity: Equilibrium and Transient Climate Sensitivity, Radiative Forcing Functions, Sensitivity To Solar Forcing
Famous quotes containing the words climate and/or sensitivity:
“Russian forests crash down under the axe, billions of trees are dying, the habitations of animals and birds are layed waste, rivers grow shallow and dry up, marvelous landscapes are disappearing forever.... Man is endowed with creativity in order to multiply that which has been given him; he has not created, but destroyed. There are fewer and fewer forests, rivers are drying up, wildlife has become extinct, the climate is ruined, and the earth is becoming ever poorer and uglier.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“What we think of as our sensitivity is only the higher evolution of terror in a poor dumb beast. We suffer for nothing. Our own death wish is our only real tragedy.”
—Mario Puzo (b. 1920)