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Wu & North 2002
Wu, Q. and North, G.R. (2002). Climate sensitivity and thermal inertia. Geophysical Research Letters 29: doi: 10.1029/2002GL014864. issn: 0094-8276.

We compare several Atmosphere/Ocean General Circulation model control runs by fitting long control runs to a simple discrete (annual averages) stochastic model: Rate of change of global heat content = difference of absorbed and emitted radiation + white noise. If the heat content is taken to be proportional to the surface temperature we can estimate the effective (broad frequency-band averaged) heat capacity for the system by a regression procedure. We find a wide range of effective heat capacities that correlate significantly with the published sensitivities of the models. Models with large sensitivities have large thermal inertia. Several interpretations are discussed.

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Abstract

Keywords
Global Change, Climate dynamics, Global Change, Atmosphere (0315, 0325), Global Change, Oceans, Meteorology and Atmospheric Dynamics, Climatology, Meteorology and Atmospheric Dynamics, Theoretical modeling
Journal
Geophysical Research Letters
http://www.agu.org/journals/gl/
Publisher
American Geophysical Union
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