Although the radiative forcing concept was originally formulated for the global, annual mean climate system, over the past decade, it has been extended to smaller spatial domains (zonal mean), and smaller time-averaging periods (seasons) in order to deal with short-lived species that have a distinct geographical and seasonal character, e.g., aerosols and O3 (see also the SAR). The global, annual average forcing estimate for these species masks the inhomogeneity in the problem such that the anticipated global mean response (via Equation 6.1) may not be adequate for gauging the spatial pattern of the actual climate change. For these classes of radiative perturbations, it is incorrect to assume that the characteristics of the responses would be necessarily co-located with the forcing, or that the magnitudes would follow the forcing patterns exactly (e.g., Cox et al., 1995; Ramaswamy and Chen, 1997b).