Diagnosis of middle-atmosphere climate sensitivity by the climate feedback–response analysis method

The middle-atmosphere CFRAM (MCFRAM) is built on the atmospheric energy equation per unit mass with radiative heating and cooling rates as its major thermal energy sources. MCFRAM preserves CFRAM's unique feature of additivity, such that partial temperature changes due to variations in external forcing and feedback processes can be added to give a total temperature change for direct comparison with the observed temperature change.

In addition, MCFRAM establishes a physical relationship of radiative damping between the energy perturbations associated with various feedback processes and temperature perturbations associated with thermal responses. In this study, MCFRAM is applied to both observations and model output fields to diagnose the middle-atmosphere climate sensitivity. The authors found that the largest component of the middle-atmosphere temperature response to the 11-yr solar cycle (solar maximum vs solar minimum) is the partial temperature change due to the variation of the solar flux.