Fig. 2: Contributing factors to Earth’s energy imbalance (EEI) trend.
From: Recent reductions in aerosol emissions have increased Earth’s energy imbalance
Trend over 2001–2019 (based on deseasonalized monthly values) in top-of-atmosphere a net, b shortwave (SW) and c longwave (LW) downward radiative flux (i.e., EEI/total: experiment BASE) split into contributions from the radiative response (αΔTs: experiment ALL2000), and effective radiative forcing (ERF: experiments BASE-ALL2000). The ERF trend is further split into contributions from changes in aerosols (ERFaero: experiments BASE-AERO2000) and other (well-mixed greenhouse gases, ozone, land use, solar) forcings (ERFother: experiments AERO2000-ALL2000). Whiskers represent the 90% confidence intervals, boxes the 66% confidence intervals, and white dots show the mean for each model, based on the trends of individual ensemble members. Black lines are from CERES for EEI (including grey shading showing a 5–95% confidence interval) and IPCC AR6 for ERFs. GFDL results for ERFaero and ERFother (light purple boxes) are based on experiments with a different setup (RFMIP; see Methods and Supplementary Fig. 7) but are included for comparison.
