Figure 7.2

Figure caption

Figure 7.2 | Schematic representation of the global mean energy budget of the Earth (upper panel), and its equivalent without considerations of cloud effects (lower panel). Numbers indicate best estimates for the magnitudes of the globally averaged energy balance components in W m^–2 together with their uncertainty ranges in parentheses (5–95% confidence range), representing climate conditions at the beginning of the 21st century. Note that the cloud-free energy budget shown in the lower panel is not the one that Earth would achieve in equilibrium when no clouds could form. It rather represents the global mean fluxes as determined solely by removing the clouds but otherwise retaining the entire atmospheric structure. This enables the quantification of the effects of clouds on the Earth energy budget and corresponds to the way clear-sky fluxes are calculated in climate models. Thus, the cloud-free energy budget is not closed and therefore the sensible and latent heat fluxes are not quantified in the lower panel. Figure adapted from Wild et al. (2015, 2019).