Links Between Internal Variability and Forced Climate Feedbacks: The Importance of Patterns of Temperature Variability and Change

Abstract

Understanding the relationships between internal variability and forced climate feedbacks is key for using observations to constrain future climate change. Here we probe and interpret the differences in these relationships between the climate change projections provided by the CMIP5 and CMIP6 experiment ensembles. We find that internal variability feedbacks better predict forced feedbacks in CMIP6 relative to CMIP5 by over 50%, and that the increased predictability derives primarily from the slow (>20 years) response to climate change. A key novel result is that the increased predictability is consistent with the higher resemblance between the patterns of internal and forced temperature changes in CMIP6, which suggests temperature pattern effects play a key role in predicting forced climate feedbacks. Despite the increased predictability, emergent constraints provided by observed internal variability are weak and largely unchanged from CMIP5 to CMIP6 due to the shortness of the observational record.