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Rapid adjustments are responses to forcing agents that cause a perturbation to the top of atmosphere energy budget but are uncoupled to changes in surface warming. Different mechanisms are responsible for these adjustments for a variety of climate drivers. These remain to be quantified in detail. It is shown that rapid adjustments reduce the effective radiative forcing (ERF) of black carbon by half of the instantaneous forcing, but for CO2 forcing, rapid adjustments increase ERF. Competing tropospheric adjustments for CO2 forcing are individually significant but sum to zero, such that the ERF equals the stratospherically adjusted radiative forcing, but this is not true for other forcing agents. Additional experiments of increase in the solar constant and increase in CH4 are used to show that a key factor of the rapid adjustment for an individual climate driver is changes in temperature in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere.

Plain Language Summary Long-term global warming can be estimated with knowledge of how climate forcing agents affect the Earth's top-of-atmosphere energy imbalance or effective radiative forcing. Changes in climate forcers, such as greenhouse gases, the Sun's intensity, or emission of aerosol particles, typically impose a direct change in the energy budget, termed an instantaneous radiative forcing. Further to this, a climate forcer may induce changes in the atmosphere, such as a change in thermal structure, clouds, or humidity. These changes themselves, termed rapid adjustments, contribute to the top-of-atmosphere energy budget. Together, the instantaneous radiative forcing plus rapid adjustments equals the effective radiative forcing. We show that for different climate forcing agents, the rapid adjustments behave very differently and are driven by different atmospheric mechanisms. For example, rapid adjustments add to the instantaneous forcing for a carbon dioxide increase, due to a cooling of the stratosphere, but oppose instantaneous forcing for black carbon, driven by a warming troposphere and lowering of cloud height. Understanding rapid adjustments gives a more complete picture of the climate effects of different climate forcers.