Contributions of anthropogenic and natural forcing to recent tropopause height changes.
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 12881562.
- No licence information is recorded for this record.
- Because redistribution is not established, this page shows the abstract only. Follow the links below for the full text.
Abstract
Observations indicate that the height of the tropopause-the boundary between the stratosphere and troposphere-has increased by several hundred meters since 1979. Comparable increases are evident in climate model experiments. The latter show that human-induced changes in ozone and well-mixed greenhouse gases account for approximately 80% of the simulated rise in tropopause height over 1979-1999. Their primary contributions are through cooling of the stratosphere (caused by ozone) and warming of the troposphere (caused by well-mixed greenhouse gases). A model-predicted fingerprint of tropopause height changes is statistically detectable in two different observational ("reanalysis") data sets. This positive detection result allows us to attribute overall tropopause height changes to a combination of anthropogenic and natural external forcings, with the anthropogenic component predominating.