Changes in Tropical Clouds and Radiation

Two potentially important papers by Wielicki et al. (1) and Chen et al. (2) dealt with aspects of how clouds and radiation vary and change, and whether climate models simulate the changes correctly. There is ample prior evidence suggesting that models have difficulties in correctly simulating clouds, and clouds are regarded as the biggest source of uncertainty in reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (3). However, an alternative interpretation of the disagreements shown between observations and models is that the analyses of the observations may be flawed.