The net warming effect of clouds on global surface temperature may be weakening or even disappearing

Abstract

Climate change is significantly influenced by both clouds and Earth's surface temperature (EST). While numerous studies have investigated clouds and EST separately, the extent of clouds' impact on EST remains unclear. Based on the inspiration and limitation of cloud radiative effect (CRE), this study provides a pioneering attempt to propose a novel indicator, cloud radiative effect on surface temperature (CREST), aiming to quantify how clouds affect EST globally while also analyzing the physical mechanism. Using reanalysis and remotely sensed data, a phased machine learning scheme in combination of surface energy balance theory is proposed to estimate EST under all-sky and hypothetical clear-sky conditions in stages, thereby estimating the newly defined CREST by subtracting the hypothetical clear-sky EST from the all-sky EST. The inter-annual experiments reveal the significant spatial heterogeneity in CREST across land, ocean, and ice/snow regions. As a global offset of the heterogeneity, clouds exhibit a net warming effect on global surface temperature on an annual scale (e.g., 0.26 K in 1981), despite their ability to block sunlight. However, the net warming effect has gradually weakened to nearly zero over the past four decades (e.g., only 0.06 K in 2021), and it's even possible to transform into a cooling effect, which might be good news for mitigating the global warming.

Keywords

Cloud radiative effect / Earth's surface temperature / Climate change / Surface energy balance

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Chuanye Shi: Writing - original draft, Visualization, Investiga-tion, Conceptualization. Tianxing Wang: Writing - review & edit-ing, Methodology, Formal analysis. Gaofeng Wang: Investigation, Formal analysis. Husi Letu: Supervision.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing finan-cial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

This work was carried out under the co-funding of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) project (Grant No. 42022008), Zhuhai basic and applied research project (Grant No. ZH22017003200009PWC), and the Innovation Group Project of Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Zhuhai) (Grant No. 311022003).

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