Effect of Volcanic Eruptions on the Vertical Temperature Profile in Radiosonde Data and Climate Models

Abstract

Abstract Both observed and modeled upper-air temperature profiles show the tropospheric cooling and tropical stratospheric warming effects from the three major volcanic eruptions since 1960. Detailed comparisons of vertical profiles of Radiosonde Atmospheric Temperature Products for Assessing Climate (RATPAC) and Hadley Centre Atmospheric Temperatures, version 2 (HadAT2), radiosonde temperatures with output from six coupled GCMs show good overall agreement on the responses to the 1991 Mount Pinatubo and 1982 El Chichón eruptions in the troposphere and stratosphere, with a tendency of the models to underestimate the upper-tropospheric cooling and overestimate the stratospheric warming relative to observations. The cooling effect at the surface in the tropics is amplified with altitude in the troposphere in both observations and models, but this amplification is greater for the observations than for the models. Models and observations show a large disagreement around 100 mb for Mount Pinatubo in the tropics, where observations show essentially no change, while models show significant warming of ∼0.7 to ∼2.6 K. This difference occurs even in models that accurately simulate stratospheric warming at 50 mb. Overall, the Parallel Climate Model is an outlier in that it simulates more volcanic-induced stratospheric warming than both the other models and the observations in most cases. From 1979 to 1999 in the tropics, RATPAC shows a trend of less than 0.1 K decade−1 at and above 300 mb before volcanic effects are removed, while the mean of the models used here has a trend of more than 0.3 K decade−1, giving a difference of ∼0.2 K decade−1. At 300 mb, from 0.02 to 0.10 K decade−1 of this difference may be due to the influence of volcanic eruptions, with the smaller estimate appearing more likely than the larger. No more than ∼0.03 K of the ∼0.1-K difference in trends between the surface and troposphere at 700 mb or below in the radiosonde data appears to be due to volcanic effects.