From NoTricksZone

By Kenneth Richard

Modeling the main factors driving climate is riddled with and precluded by observational error. Some scientists now acknowledge this.

Clouds are a main factor – even the “most important factor” – controlling changes in the Earth’s radiation budget, or climate (Sfîcă et al., 2021, Lenaerts et al., 2020).

But as scientists acknowledge in a new study (Ademakinwa et al., 2024), substantial errors in calculating cloud effects on climate are inevitable because three-dimensional (3D, vertical and horizontal) cloud affects are reality, and current calculations only consider one-dimensional cloud properties (1D, vertical).

“Failed retrievals” in radiative property simulations of cloud effects occur over 40% of the time. This leads to biases, errors amounting to ±36 W/m².

Considering this error margin of 72 W/m² is 360 times larger than the total forcing from CO2 over the span of 10 years (0.2 W/m²) for an imaginary clear-sky-only (cloudless) Earth (Feldman et al., 2015), it is not possible to detect the real-world effect of CO2 forcing in any radiative transfer calculation.

Summary:

“Since clouds in reality have three-dimensional (3D) structures, the simulation of radiative transfer (RT) in clouds should ideally consider the transport of radiation in both vertical and horizontal directions (referred to as ‘3D RT’).”

However, “operational bispectral cloud retrievals are almost exclusively based on the one-dimensional (1D) RT theory that considers only the vertical and ignores the net horizontal transport of radiation.”

Consequently, “the radiative properties of clouds under 3D RT are substantially different from those under 1D RT.”

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