Response of shortwave cloud radiative effect to greenhouse gases and aerosols and its impact on daily maximum temperature

Shortwave cloud radiative effects (SWCRE), defined as the difference of shortwave radiative flux between all-sky and clear-sky conditions, have been reported to play an important role in influencing the Earth’s energy budget and temperature extremes. In this study, we employed a set of global climate models to examine the SWCRE responses to CO2, black carbon (BC) aerosols and sulfate aerosols in boreal summer over the Northern Hemisphere. We found that CO2 causes positive SWCRE changes over most of the NH, and BC causes similar positive responses over North America, Europe and East China but negative SWCRE over India and tropical Africa. When normalized by effective radiative forcing, the SWCRE from BC is roughly 3–5 times larger than that from CO2. SWCRE change is mainly due to cloud cover changes resulting from the changes in relative humidity (RH) and, to a lesser extent, changes in circulation and stability. The SWCRE response to sulfate aerosols, however, is negligible compared to that for CO2 and BC. Using a multilinear regression model, it is found that mean daily maximum temperature (Tmax) increases by 0.15 K and 0.13 K per W m−2 increase in local SWCRE under the CO2 and BC experiment, respectively. When domain-averaged, the SWCRE change contribution to summer mean Tmax changes was 10–30 % under CO2 forcing and 30–50 % under BC forcing, varying by region, which can have important implications for extreme climatic events and socio-economic activities.