文章基本信息

标题：Climate forcing and response to idealized changes in surface latent and sensible heat
本地全文：下载
作者：George A Ban-Weiss ; Govindasamy Bala ; Long Cao 等
期刊名称：Environmental Research Letters
印刷版ISSN：1748-9326
电子版ISSN：1748-9326
出版年度：2011
卷号：6
期号：3
页码：034032-034032
DOI：10.1088/1748-9326/6/3/034032
语种：English
出版社：IOP Publishing Ltd
摘要：Land use and land cover changes affect the partitioning of latent and sensible heat, which impacts the broader climate system. Increased latent heat flux to the atmosphere has a local cooling influence known as 'evaporative cooling', but this energy will be released back to the atmosphere wherever the water condenses. However, the extent to which local evaporative cooling provides a global cooling influence has not been well characterized. Here, we perform a highly idealized set of climate model simulations aimed at understanding the effects that changes in the balance between surface sensible and latent heating have on the global climate system. We find that globally adding a uniform 1 W m^{− 2} source of latent heat flux along with a uniform 1 W m^{− 2} sink of sensible heat leads to a decrease in global mean surface air temperature of 0.54 ± 0.04 K. This occurs largely as a consequence of planetary albedo increases associated with an increase in low elevation cloudiness caused by increased evaporation. Thus, our model results indicate that, on average, when latent heating replaces sensible heating, global, and not merely local, surface temperatures decrease.