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Water vapor in the upper troposphere strongly regulates the strength of water-vapor feedback, which is the primary process for amplifying the response of the climate system to external radiative forcings. Monitoring changes in upper-tropospheric water vapor and scrutinizing the causes of such changes are therefore of great importance for establishing the credibility of model projections of past and future climates. Here, we use coupled ocean-atmosphere model simulations under different climate-forcing scenarios to investigate satellite-observed changes in global-mean upper-tropospheric water vapor. Our analysis demonstrates that the upper-tropospheric moistening observed over the period 1979-2005 cannot be explained by natural causes and results principally from an anthropogenic warming of the climate. By attributing the observed increase directly to human activities, this study verifies the presence of the largest known feedback mechanism for amplifying anthropogenic climate change.detection | attribution | long-term monitoring B ecause water vapor is the principal greenhouse gas, variations in its concentration strongly influence the climate's response to both anthropogenic and natural forcings (1). Changes in the amount of water vapor in the upper troposphere play a particularly important role because the trapping of outgoing terrestrial radiation is proportional to the logarithm of watervapor concentration (1, 2), and climate models predict enhanced moistening in the upper troposphere compared with the boundary layer (3). Although short-term fluctuations of upper-tropospheric water vapor are consistent among reanalysis datasets, decadal variations show substantial discrepancies even in sign (4, 5). Hence, long-term monitoring of upper-tropospheric water-vapor changes, and understanding causes responsible for such changes are essential for enhancing confidence in the prediction of future climate change (4, 6).Changes in upper-tropospheric water vapor have been examined based on satellite-observed radiances of 6.7-μm water-vapor channels (3,7,8), which are closely related to the layer-mean relative humidity in the upper troposphere (9). Decadal trends in upper-tropospheric relative humidity exhibits distinct regional patterns associated with changes in the atmospheric circulation, but the decadal trends over larger domains are small due to opposing changes at regional scales (8). Analyzing the globalscale changes in 6.7-μm water-vapor radiances reveals little change over the past three decades. However, when the 6.7-μm radiances are examined relative to microwave radiance emissions from oxygen, a distinct radiative signature of upper-tropospheric moistening can be revealed (3).Although the presence of a moistening trend has been detected in the satellite record, the cause of this moistening has not been determined. Thus, it remains unclear whether the observed moistening could result from natural fluctuations in the climate system, or whether human activities have significantly contributed to the trend. Becaus...

Abstract. Diurnal variations of upper tropospheric humidity (UTH) as well as middle tropospheric humidity (MTH) were examined in conjunction with the diurnal cycle of convection over tropical Africa and the adjacent tropical Atlantic Ocean using Meteosat-8 measurements. Cloud and humidity features were also tracked to document the diurnal variations of humidity and clouds in the Lagrangian framework.A distinct diurnal variation of UTH (and MTH) is noted over regions where tropical deep convective cloud systems are commonly observed. The amplitude of the UTH diurnal variation is larger over land, while its variations over convectively inactive subtropical regions are much smaller. The diurnal variation of UTH tends to reach a maximum during nighttime over land, lagging deep convection and high cloud whose maxima occurred in the late afternoon and evening, respectively. It was revealed that these diurnal variations over the African continent are likely associated with continental-scale daytime solar heating and topography, in which topographically-induced signals develop earlier around the mid-afternoon and merge into stronger and broader continental-scale convection clusters later, forming a precipitation maximum in the late afternoon. It was also revealed that advection effect on the diurnal variation appears to be insignificant.

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