The following is an update of Vertical Profiles of Climate Change. The analyses compare vertical profiles of climate model predictions from past NASA GISS Model E runs with the profiles of the ECMWF ReAnalysis (ERA5), of the Integrated Global Radiosonde Archive (IGRA) V2 data set, and of the Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) and the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) satellite based Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) data. The analysis is for the Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) Era ( 1979 through 2022 ).
Discussion
The trends of this update, differ only slightly from those through 2020, but the updated trends exhibit the following qualitative characteristics.
Temperature. Broadly, observations and reanalyses tend to support the modeled predictions of decreasing stratospheric temperature, increasing tropospheric temperature, and an Arctic maxima of temperature increase. The Hot Spot is not well supported over the MSU era.
Zonal Wind Speed. The mid-latitude upper “t-bone” shaped maxima appear in the reanalysis. There are qualitative contradictions of zonal wind speed between model and reanalysis elsewhere. The RAOB data appear to lack coherent trends.
Humidity. The tropospheric Northern extratropics tend to support the modeled increase of absolute humidity. However, observed trends also indicate areas of relatively intense decreases of absolute humidity which conflict with modeled trends.
Cloud Fraction. Reanalysis cloud fraction trends are in qualitative disagreement with modeled cloud fraction trends for large portions of the global vertical profile.
There are uncertainties with the reanalyses, raob averages and satellite based data. Among other things, spatial and temporal coverage are sparse, instrumentation and calibrations change over time with observations. And the reanalysis process involves a degree of prognostication, extrapolation, and use of similar parameterizations as those in the climate models against which we compare results.
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