Robust non-local effects of ocean heat uptake on radiative feedback and subtropical cloud cover

Much recent work has pointed to the limitations of the global mean planetary energy budget as a useful diagnostic tool for understanding transient climate response, because the climate sensitivity (or radiative feedback) governing the relationships between ocean heat content, surface temperature and top-of-atmosphere energy imbalance depends sensitively on timescale, spatial pattern and nature of the climate forcing. Progress has been made by treating the slowly-evolving (and spatially complex) pattern of ocean heat uptake as a quasi-equilibrium forcing on the “fast” components of the climate system: the atmospheric radiative-dynamical processes that link air-sea heat exchange to the top-of-atmosphere energy budget. Differences between these feedbacks and those on CO2 radiative forcing can be expressed as an “efficacy” of ocean heat uptake. We use idealized slab ocean GCMs forced by prescribed steady energy sinks limited to specific latitude bands (representing heat exchange with the deep ocean) to quantify how (and why) the efficacy depends on the spatial pattern of ocean heat uptake. By repeating the experiment across several independent GCMs we identify robust and non-robust aspects of the response. We find that the efficacy of sub-polar heat uptake is 3 to 4 times larger than the efficacy of tropical heat uptake. Radiative kernel analysis allows an accurate partition into feedbacks due to temperature, water vapor and clouds. We find large and robust differences in clear-sky lapse rate feedbacks, associated with robust differences in large-scale atmospheric circulation and stratification driven by ocean heat uptake. A more novel and surprising result is the robustness across several independent GCMs of the differences in subtropical low cloud feedback (positive under high-latitude uptake, strongly negative under tropical uptake). We trace these robust differences to thermodynamic constraints associated with lower-tropospheric stability and boundary layer moisture. Our results suggest that cloud feedback under transient climate change is partly modulated by ocean heat uptake through robust but non-local atmospheric processes, and has implications on a timescales ranging from inter-annual to multi-centennial.