Poster's note : this reminds me of an earlier paper which successfully simplified climate models by making assumptions about turbulent heat transfer. Sadly, I've lost it!
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014GL062589/abstract The hydrological sensitivity to global warming and solar geoengineering derived from thermodynamic constraints Axel Kleidon, Ben Kravitz and Maik Renner Geophysical Research Letters Kleidon,[email protected] doi: 10.1002/2014GL062589 Accepted manuscript online: 16 DEC 2014 12:27AM EST Keywords: hydrologic cycle;climate change;geoengineering;thermodynamics (remarkable editing fail - >) Abstarct We derive analytic expressions of the transient response of the hydrological cycle to surface warming from the surface energy balance in which turbulent heat fluxes are constrained by the thermodynamic limit of maximum power. For a given steady-state temperature change, this approach predicts the transient and steady-state response of surface energy partitioning and the hydrologic cycle. We show that the predicted hydrological sensitivities to greenhouse warming and solar geoengineering are comparable to the results from climate model simulations of the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP). Although not all effects can be explained, our approach nevertheless predicts the general trend as well as the magnitude of the changes in the global-scale hydrological cycle surprisingly well. This implies that much of the global-scale changes in the hydrologic cycle can be robustly predicted by the response of the thermodynamically-constrained surface energy balance to altered radiative forcing. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
