UC Irvine Earth System Scientists Discover Missing Piece in Climate Models

As the planet continues to warm due to human-driven climate change, accurate computer climate models will be key in helping illuminate exactly how the climate will continue to be altered in the years ahead.

In a study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, a team led by researchers from the UC Irvine Department of Earth System Science and the University of Michigan Department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering reveal how a climate model commonly used by geoscientists currently overestimates a key physical property of Earth’s climate system called albedo, which is the degree to which ice reflects planet-warming sunlight into space.

“We found that with old model versions, the ice is too reflective by about five percent,” said Chloe Clarke, a project scientist in UC Irvine professor Charlie Zender’s group. “Ice reflectivity was much too high.”

The amount of sunlight the planet receives and reflects is important for estimating just how much the planet will warm in the coming years. Previous versions of the model, called the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM), overestimated albedo because they did not account for what Clarke described as the microphysical properties of ice in a warming world.

Read more at University of California – Irvine