Reconciliation of modeled climate responses to spectral solar forcing

Abstract

The SIM (Spectral Irradiance Monitor) on SORCE (Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment) provides more spectrally complete daily SSI (spectral solar irradiance) measurements than ever before, allowing us to explore chemical and physical processes in the Earth's ocean and atmosphere system. However, the newly observed SSI instigated controversies in the Sun‐climate community on whether the SIM‐observed trends are true solar variations and on whether climate responses are in phase or out of phase with solar forcing. In this study, we focus on resolving two apparently contradictory results published on possible temperature responses to SIM‐derived solar forcing. When applying extreme scenarios of SIM‐based spectral solar forcing in a radiative‐convective model (RCM), we find that some apparently contradictory results can be explained by the different methods used to apply the SIM SSI data. It is clear that accurate SSI data are essential for accurate climate simulations and that climate modelers need to take care how they apply these data.