The phrase
"radiative perturbation" refers to a disturbance or change in the flow of energy through radiation. It can happen when there is an alteration in the balance of energy entering or leaving a system. This perturbation can have impacts on the environment, climate, or other systems that depend on the flow of radiation.
Full definition
The heights of the rectangular bars denote best estimate values guided by published values of the climate change agents and conversion to
radiative perturbations using simplified expressions for the greenhouse gas concentrations and model calculations for the ice sheets, vegetation and mineral dust.
To achieve that, it can be helpful to identify an empirical relationship between the inter-model spread of an observable variable (hereafter named A) and the inter-model responses B to a
given radiative perturbation.
Radiative perturbation from icesheet and changed sealevel is estimated -3.2 W / m2 (with higher uncertainties than GHG), Vegatation and aerosols estimated -1 W / m2.
Such changes are apparently sufficient to trigger major changes in climate — implying that the Earth's climate system may be more sensitive to small
solar radiative perturbations than one might think.
The
partial radiative perturbations (PRPs) due to changes in cloud and due to the effects of the pre-existing climatological cloud distribution on non-cloud changes, known as «cloud masking», are calculated when atmospheric CO2 concentration is doubled for the HadSM3 and MIROC models and for a large ensemble of parameter perturbed models based on HadSM3.
As a diagnostic study, though, if these albedo monitoring techniques are borne out by further study, they could provide another tool for studying the climate's response to
radiative perturbations.
However, because global warming is always of one sign, a much bigger impact is from the cumulative effects of
these radiative perturbations on the climate.
These methods include the «partial
radiative perturbation» approach and its variants (e.g., Colman, 2003a; Soden and Held, 2006), the use of radiative - convective models and the «cloud radiative forcing» method (e.g., Webb et al., 2006).
Closed blue and open black symbols from Colman (2003a) represent calculations determined using the partial
radiative perturbation (PRP) and the radiative - convective method (RCM) approaches respectively.