How much do tropical anvil clouds shrink as Earth warms? · revision history

Revision 2

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Title
How much do tropical anvil clouds shrink as Earth warms?
Plain
High, thin anvil-shaped clouds spread out from tropical thunderstorms and trap heat. If they shrink with warming, more heat escapes to space, a cooling effect called the 'iris' hypothesis, but its size is debated.
Precise · changed · core
Revision 1: The tropical anvil cloud area feedback was assessed at about $-2e2 \pm 2e2\,\mathrm{erg}/(\mathrm{s}\,\mathrm{cm}^2\,\mathrm{K})$ (Sherwood and coauthors 2020), while the iris hypothesis (Lindzen and coauthors 2001) argued for a much more negative value. Determine the global anvil-area feedback and its mechanism (stability iris, changes in convective aggregation, anvil lifetime and microphysics) with uncertainty below about $1e2\,\mathrm{erg}/(\mathrm{s}\,\mathrm{cm}^2\,\mathrm{K})$.
Revision 2: The tropical anvil cloud area feedback was assessed at about $-2 \times 10^{2} \pm 2 \times 10^{2}\,\mathrm{erg}/(\mathrm{s}\,\mathrm{cm}^2\,\mathrm{K})$ (Sherwood and coauthors 2020), while the iris hypothesis (Lindzen and coauthors 2001) argued for a much more negative value. Determine the global anvil-area feedback and its mechanism (stability iris, changes in convective aggregation, anvil lifetime and microphysics) with uncertainty below about $10^{2}\,\mathrm{erg}/(\mathrm{s}\,\mathrm{cm}^2\,\mathrm{K})$.
Settled by
Cloud-resolving simulations under warming with resolved anvil microphysics, validated against satellite relations between anvil area, cloud radiative effect and surface temperature.
Kind
well-posed
Answer type
value
References
(empty)
Literature status
open
Status note
McKim, Bony and Dufresne (Nature Geoscience 2024, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-024-01414-4) argued that physical and observational constraints imply a weak anvil-area feedback.
Posed since
(empty)

Decisions