Solar Sensitivity

by W. Eschenbach, Oct 16, 2022 in WUWT


In my previous post, “Global Scatterplots“, I discussed how a gridcell-by-gridcell scatterplot of the entire globe could be used to gain insights into the relationship between two variables. The variables I discussed in that post were the cloud radiative effect (CRE) as a function of the temperature. At the end of that post, I threatened as follows:

I will return to what I’ve learned from other gridcell scatterplots in the next post.

So as foretold in the ancient palimpsest texts … he’s baack!

For this expedition into global scatterplots, Figure 1 shows the surface temperature as a function of the amount of solar power that’s actually entering the climate system. This available solar power is the top-of-atmosphere (TOA) solar, minus the “albedo reflections”, which are the amount of sunlight reflected back to space by the clouds and the surface.