Climate feedbacks are vital in shaping the extent of global warming. While directly observing climate feedbacks is hardly feasible, it is possible to establish a relationship between them and top-of-the-atmosphere flux changes in response to natural fluctuations in surface temperature. In this study, we explore this method to potentially constrain climate feedbacks in climate models using observations. Our findings reveal significant correlations for longwave and shortwave feedbacks within a period of 14 years. This allows for utilizing satellite observations and reanalysis to show that models exhibiting moderate negative longwave and moderate positive shortwave internal variability feedbacks demonstrate better consistency with observations. The emergence of the relationship for the net feedback requires a longer time, about 60 years. Continuous satellite records need to be maintained minimum until the mid-2040s before estimates of observed net internal variability feedback can be used to constrain net forced climate feedback, and thereby climate sensitivity.

Increases of atmospheric water vapor holding capacity with temperature (7-8%K^(-1), CC-rate) can lead to increasing Extreme Precipitation (EP). Observations show that tropical EP has increased during the last five decades with a rate higher than in the extratropics. Global climate models (GCM’s) diverge in the magnitude of increase in the tropics, and cloud-resolving models (CRM’s) indicate correlations between changes in tropical EP and organization of deep convection. We conducted global-scale aquaplanet experiments at a wide range of resolutions with explicit and parameterized convection to bridge the gap between GCM’s and CRM’s. We found increases of tropical EP beyond the CC rate, with similar magnitudes when using explicit convection and parametrized convection at the resolution it is tuned for. Those super-CC rates are produced due to strengthening updrafts where extreme precipitation occurs, and they do not exhibit relations with changes in convective organization.