411 research outputs found
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UKCA Chemistry and Aerosol Tutorials at vn10.9 using Rose & Cylc
Tutorials covering how to use the United Kingdom Chemistry and Aerosols Composition-Climate Model at Unified Model version 10.
Local and remote climate impacts of future African aerosol emissions
The potential future trend in African aerosol emissions is uncertain, with a large range found in future scenarios used to drive climate projections. The future climate impact of these emissions is therefore uncertain. Using the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) scenarios, transient future experiments were performed with the UK Earth System Model (UKESM1) to investigate the effect of African emissions following the high emission SSP370 scenario as the rest of the world follows the more sustainable SSP119, relative to a global SSP119 control. This isolates the effect of Africa following a relatively more polluted future emissions pathway. Compared to SSP119, SSP370 projects higher non-biomass-burning (non-BB) aerosol emissions, but lower biomass burning emissions, over Africa. Increased shortwave (SW) absorption by black carbon aerosol leads to a global warming, but the reduction in the local incident surface radiation close to the emissions is larger, causing a local cooling effect. The local cooling persists even when including the higher African CO2 emissions under SSP370 than SSP119. The global warming is significantly higher by 0.07 K when including the non-BB aerosol increases and higher still (0.22 K) when including all aerosols and CO2. Precipitation also exhibits complex changes. Northward shifts in the Inter-tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) occur under relatively warm Northern Hemisphere land, and local rainfall is enhanced due to mid-tropospheric instability from black carbon absorption. These results highlight the importance of future African aerosol emissions for regional and global climate and the spatial complexity of this climate influence
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Impacts of increasing the aerosol complexity in the Met Office global numerical weather prediction model.
The inclusion of the direct and indirect radiative effects of aerosols in high-resolution global numerical weather prediction (NWP) models is being increasingly recognised as important for the improved accuracy of short-range weather forecasts. In this study the impacts of increasing the aerosol complexity in the global NWP configuration of the Met Office Unified Model (MetUM) are investigated. A hierarchy of aerosol representations are evaluated including three-dimensional monthly mean speciated aerosol climatologies, fully prognostic aerosols modelled using the CLASSIC aerosol scheme and finally, initialised aerosols using assimilated aerosol fields from the GEMS project. The prognostic aerosol schemes are better able to predict the temporal and spatial variation of atmospheric aerosol optical depth, which is particularly important in cases of large sporadic aerosol events such as large dust storms or forest fires. Including the direct effect of aerosols improves model biases in outgoing long-wave radiation over West Africa due to a better representation of dust. However, uncertainties in dust optical properties propagate to its direct effect and the subsequent model response. Inclusion of the indirect aerosol effects improves surface radiation biases at the North Slope of Alaska ARM site due to lower cloud amounts in high-latitude clean-air regions. This leads to improved temperature and height forecasts in this region. Impacts on the global mean model precipitation and large-scale circulation fields were found to be generally small in the short-range forecasts. However, the indirect aerosol effect leads to a strengthening of the low-level monsoon flow over the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal and an increase in precipitation over Southeast Asia. Regional impacts on the African Easterly Jet (AEJ) are also presented with the large dust loading in the aerosol climatology enhancing of the heat low over West Africa and weakening the AEJ. This study highlights the importance of including a more realistic treatment of aerosol–cloud interactions in global NWP models and the potential for improved global environmental prediction systems through the incorporation of more complex aerosol schemes
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Weak average liquid-cloud-water response to anthropogenic aerosols
The cooling of the Earth’s climate through the effects of anthropogenic aerosols on clouds offsets an unknown fraction of greenhouse gas warming. An increase in the amount of water inside liquid-phase clouds induced by aerosols, through the suppression of rain formation, has been postulated to lead to substantial cooling, which would imply that the Earth’s surface temperature is highly sensitive to anthropogenic forcing. Here we provide direct observational evidence that, instead of a strong increase, aerosols cause a relatively weak average decrease in the amount of water in liquid-phase clouds compared with unpolluted clouds. Measurements of polluted clouds downwind of various anthropogenic sources—such as oil refineries, smelters, coal-fired power plants, cities, wildfires and ships—reveal that aerosol-induced cloud-water increases, caused by suppressed rain formation, and decreases, caused by enhanced evaporation of cloud water, partially cancel each other out. We estimate that the observed decrease in cloud water offsets 23% of the global climate-cooling effect caused by aerosol-induced increases in the concentration of cloud droplets. These findings invalidate the hypothesis that increases in cloud water cause a substantial climate cooling effect and translate into reduced uncertainty in projections of future climate
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Updated estimate of aerosol direct radiative forcing from satellite observations and comparison against the Hadley Centre climate model
The fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) includes a comparison of observation-based and modeling-based estimates of the aerosol direct radiative forcing. In this comparison, satellite-based studies suggest a more negative aerosol direct radiative forcing than modeling studies. A previous satellite-based study, part of the IPCC comparison, uses aerosol optical depths and accumulation-mode fractions retrieved by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) at collection 4. The latest version of MODIS products, named collection 5, improves aerosol retrievals. Using these products, the direct forcing in the shortwave spectrum defined with respect to present-day natural aerosols is now estimated at −1.30 and −0.65 Wm−2 on a global clear-sky and all-sky average, respectively, for 2002. These values are still significantly more negative than the numbers reported by modeling studies. By accounting for differences between present-day natural and preindustrial aerosol concentrations, sampling biases, and investigating the impact of differences in the zonal distribution of anthropogenic aerosols, good agreement is reached between the direct forcing derived from MODIS and the Hadley Centre climate model HadGEM2-A over clear-sky oceans. Results also suggest that satellite estimates of anthropogenic aerosol optical depth over land should be coupled with a robust validation strategy in order to refine the observation-based estimate of aerosol direct radiative forcing. In addition, the complex problem of deriving the aerosol direct radiative forcing when aerosols are located above cloud still needs to be addressed
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Best scale for detecting the effects of stratospheric sulphate aerosol geoengineering on surface temperature
Stratospheric sulfate aerosol injection (SAI) has been proposed as a way to geo-engineer climate. Whilst swift global-mean surface cooling is generally expected from tropical SAI, the regional impacts of such perturbation on near-surface air temperature (SAT) are projected to be spatially inhomogeneous. By using existing simulations from the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP) G4 scenario, where 5 Tg yr-1 of sulfur dioxide (SO2) is injected into the tropical stratosphere to offset some of the warming in a mid-range representative greenhouse gas concentration pathway (RCP4.5) between 2020 and 2070, we examine the regional detectability of the SAI surface cooling effect, and attempt to find the best spatial scale for potential SAI monitoring. We use optimal fingerprint detection and attribution techniques to estimate the time horizon over which the SAI surface cooling effect would be detected after implementation in 2020 on sub-global scales, ranging from the near-global in situ observational coverage down to sub-continental regions. We show that using the spatio-temporal SAT pattern across the Northern and Southern extra-tropics and the Tropics, and across the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, as well as averaging SATs over the whole globe robustly result in successful SAI detection within 10 years of geoengineering implementation in a majority of the included plausible geoengineering realizations. However, detecting the SAI effect on SAT within the first decade of implementation would be more challenging on sub-continental scales
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Volcano and ship tracks indicate excessive aerosol-induced cloud water increases in a climate model
Aerosol-cloud interaction is the most uncertain mechanism of anthropogenic radiative forcing of Earth’s climate, and aerosol-induced cloud water changes are particularly poorly constrained in climate models. By combining satellite retrievals of volcano and ship tracks in stratocumulus clouds, we compile a unique observational dataset and confirm that liquid water path (LWP) responses to aerosols are bidirectional, and on average the increases in LWP are closely compensated by the decreases. Moreover, the meteorological parameters controlling the LWP responses are strikingly similar between the volcano and ship tracks. In stark contrast to observations, there are substantial unidirectional increases in LWP in the Hadley Centre climate model, because the model accounts only for the decreased precipitation efficiency and not for the enhanced entrainment drying. If the LWP increases in the model were compensated by the decreases as the observations suggest, its indirect aerosol radiative forcing in stratocumulus regions would decrease by 45%
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Southeast Atlantic Ocean aerosol direct radiative effects over clouds: comparison of observations and simulations
Absorbing aerosols exert a warming or a cooling effect on the Earth’s system, depending on the circumstances. The direct radiative effect (DRE) of absorbing aerosols is negative (cooling) at the top-of-the-atmosphere (TOA) over a dark surface like the ocean, as the aerosols increase the planetary albedo, but it is positive (warming) over bright backgrounds like clouds. Furthermore, radiation absorption by aerosols heat the atmosphere locally, and, through rapid adjustments of the atmospheric column and cloud dynamics, the net effect can be amplified considerably. We developed a technique to study the absorption of radiation of smoke over low lying clouds using satellite spectrometry. The TOA DRE of smoke over clouds is large and positive over the southeast Atlantic Ocean off the west coast of Africa, which can be explained by the large decrease of reflected radiation by a polluted cloud, especially in the UV. However, general circulation models (GCMs) fail to reproduce these strong positive DRE, and in general GCMs disagree on the magnitude and even sign of the aerosol DRE in the southeast Atlantic region. Our satellite-derived DRE measurements show clear seasonal and inter-annual variations, consistent with other satellite measurements, which are not reproduced by GCMs. A comparison with model results showed discrepancies with the Ångström exponent of the smoke aerosols, which is larger than assumed in simulations, and a sensitivity to emission scenarios. However, this was not enough to explain the discrepancies, and we suspect that the modeling of cloud distributions and microphysics will have the necessary larger impact on DRE that will explain the differences between observations and modeling
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Constraining uncertainty in aerosol direct forcing
The uncertainty in present-day anthropogenic forcing is dominated by uncertainty in the strength of the contribution from aerosol. Much of the uncertainty in the direct aerosol forcing can be attributed to uncertainty in the anthropogenic fraction of aerosol in the present-day atmosphere, due to a lack of historical observations. Here we present a robust relationship between total present-day aerosol optical depth and the anthropogenic contribution across three multi-model ensembles and a large single-model perturbed parameter ensemble. Using observations of aerosol optical depth, we determine a reduced likely range of the anthropogenic component and hence a reduced uncertainty in the direct forcing of aerosol
Images in cardiovascular medicine. Mitral valve varix.
International audienceA 39-year-old man presented with atypical angina and hemoptysis. This soldier traveled regularly to the Middle-East and Africa. Initial clinical examination was within normal limits, as were also the ECG, biochemistry, and hematologic blood samples..
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