Data for manuscript: "Contrasting mechanisms dictate climate sensitivities in response to tropical versus extratropical forcings"

Climate sensitivity and radiative feedbacks across a variety of scenarios have been understood in recent years in terms of diverse surface warming patterns. The question of how these warming patterns arise, in response to different forcing patterns, has remained poorly understood. To improve our understanding in this regard, we performed a set of experiments with heating prescribed over tropical and extratropical oceans, in a pair of distinct climate models. Through these, we found contrasting mechanisms in both cases. There is low sensitivity to tropical heating, owing to rapid warm pool warming. By contrast, there is a high sensitivity to extratropical heating which involves deep ocean heat uptake that distributes warming homogeneously. Different resulting warming patterns drive shortwave cloud feedbacks of opposite signs, leading to contrasted sensitivities. We further find that these heatings do not combine linearly in their responses, highlighting a non-linearity in the climate response to combining forcing patterns.