Local and remote impacts of regional aerosol emissions on climate

Aerosols are short-lived in the atmosphere, and so their distribution and climate forcing is very inhomogeneous. To understand the behaviour of the climate system in response to inhomogeneous forcing, and to inform emission policy choices, we must investigate how emissions from individual geographic regions affect the climate regionally and globally. I present here the results of two interwoven modelling studies. First, I analyse the simulated temperature response to perturbing sulfur dioxide emissions over a specific region – China – in three current generation climate models. Second, I systematically investigate with a single model the temperature and precipitation responses to black carbon and sulfur dioxide emissions from the United States, Europe, East Asia, and India. These simulations reveal in the first instance that there is very large uncertainty around aerosol-climate interactions in present climate models. Removing SO2 emissions from China results in a six-fold difference in the optical depth and short-wave flux changes over China between different models, and the resulting surface temperature response is poorly constrained. However, the subsequent systematic perturbations indicate that in the event the regional forcing is large, then there are striking features of the climate response that are consistent across different perturbation locations. Emission changes always result not only in a strong local response around the emission region, but also a strong remote response, the pattern of which is insensitive to the original location of emission changes. There is, however, variation in the efficacy with which emissions from different regions force the climate, with US and European sulphur dioxide emission changes having a larger effect than East Asian emission changes. The results presented here are relevant for understanding the effect of potential future emission controls, and also for understanding how the climate responds to different localised forcings, which has not been tested in complex coupled climate models previously.Open Acces

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

Reduced order digital twin and latent data assimilation for global wildfire prediction

The occurrence of forest fires can impact vegetation in the ecosystem, property, and human health, but also indirectly affect the climate. JULES-INFERNO is a global land surface model, which simulates vegetation, soils, and fire occurrence driven by environmental factors. However, this model incurs substantial computational costs due to the high data dimensionality and the complexity of differential equations. Deep learning-based digital twins have an advantage in handling large amounts of data. They can reduce the computational cost of subsequent predictive models by extracting data features through Reduced Order Modelling (ROM) and then compressing the data to a low-dimensional latent space. This study proposes a JULES-INFERNO-based digital twin fire model using ROM techniques and deep learning prediction networks to improve the efficiency of global wildfire predictions. The iterative prediction implemented in the proposed model can use current-year data to predict fires in subsequent years. To avoid the accumulation of errors from the iterative prediction, Latent data Assimilation (LA) is applied to the prediction process. LA manages to efficiently adjust the prediction results to ensure the stability and sustainability of the prediction. Numerical results show that the proposed model can effectively encode the original data and achieve accurate surrogate predictions. Furthermore, the application of LA can also effectively adjust the bias of the prediction results. The proposed digital twin also runs 500 times faster for online predictions than the original JULES-INFERNO model without requiring High-Performance Computing (HPC) clusters. The implementation code of this study and the developed models are available at https://github.com/DL-WG/Digital-twin-LA-global-wildfire.</p

Matter-antimatter rearrangements using the R-matrix method

Funding The contribution of EK was supported by the Ada Lovelace Centre, UK Science and Technology Facilities Council. MP’s work made use of support by CoSeC, the Computational Science Centre for Research Communities, through Collaborative Computational Project Q and High-End-Consortium (HEC) UK-AMOR. Acknowledgments We are grateful for helpful discussions with Jonathan Tennyson and Mike Charlton. The bound-state calculations were performed using the Maxwell High Performance Computing Cluster of the University of Aberdeen IT Service.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

A global behavioural model of human fire use and management: WHAM! v1.0

Fire is an integral ecosystem process and a major natural source of vegetation disturbance globally. Yet at the same time, humans use and manage fire in diverse ways and for a huge range of purposes. Therefore, it is perhaps unsurprising that a central finding of the first Fire Model Intercomparison Project was simplistic representation of humans is a substantial shortcoming in the fire modules of dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs). In response to this challenge, we present a novel, global geospatial model that seeks to capture the diversity of human–fire interactions. Empirically grounded with a global database of anthropogenic fire impacts, WHAM! (the Wildfire Human Agency Model) represents the underlying behavioural and land system drivers of human approaches to fire management and their impact on fire regimes. WHAM! is designed to be coupled with DGVMs (JULES-INFERNO in the current instance), such that human and biophysical drivers of fire on Earth, and their interactions, can be captured in process-based models for the first time. Initial outputs from WHAM! presented here are in line with previous evidence suggesting managed anthropogenic fire use is decreasing globally and point to land use intensification as the underlying reason for this phenomenon.</p

Similar patterns of tropical precipitation and circulation changes under solar and greenhouse gas forcing

Funder: "Cosmic and electric effects on aerosols and clouds”; Grant(s): (MIS: 5049552)Funder: Villum Fonden; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100008398Abstract: Theory and model evidence indicate a higher global hydrological sensitivity for the same amount of surface warming to solar as to greenhouse gas (GHG) forcing, but regional patterns are highly uncertain due to their dependence on circulation and dynamics. We analyse a multi-model ensemble of idealized experiments and a set of simulations of the last millennium and we demonstrate similar global signatures and patterns of forced response in the tropical Pacific, of higher sensitivity for the solar forcing. In the idealized simulations, both solar and GHG forcing warm the equatorial Pacific, enhance precipitation in the central Pacific, and weaken and shift the Walker circulation eastward. Centennial variations in the solar forcing over the last millennium cause similar patterns of enhanced equatorial precipitation and slowdown of the Walker circulation in response to periods with stronger solar forcing. Similar forced patterns albeit of considerably weaker magnitude are identified for variations in GHG concentrations over the 20th century, with the lower sensitivity explained by fast atmospheric adjustments. These findings differ from previous studies that have typically suggested divergent responses in tropical precipitation and circulation between the solar and GHG forcings. We conclude that tropical Walker circulation and precipitation might be more susceptible to solar variability rather than GHG variations during the last-millennium, assuming comparable global mean surface temperature changes

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

Regional and global temperature response to anthropogenic SO2 emissions from China in three climate models

We use the HadGEM3-GA4, CESM1, and GISS ModelE2 climate models to investigate the global and regional aerosol burden, radiative flux, and surface temperature responses to removing anthropogenic sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions from China. We find that the models differ by up to a factor of six in the simulated change in aerosol optical depth (AOD) and shortwave radiative flux over China that results from reduced sulfate aerosol, leading to a large range of magnitudes in the regional and global temperature responses. Two of the three models simulate a near-ubiquitous hemispheric warming due to the regional SO2 removal, with similarities in the local and remote pattern of response, but overall with a substantially different magnitude. The third model simulates almost no significant temperature response. We attribute the discrepancies in the response to a combination of substantial differences in the chemical conversion of SO2 to sulfate, translation of sulfate mass into AOD, cloud radiative interactions, and differences in the radiative forcing efficiency of sulfate aerosol in the models. The model with the strongest response (HadGEM3-GA4) compares best with observations of AOD regionally, however the other two models compare similarly (albeit poorly) and still disagree substantially in their simulated climate response, indicating th at total AOD observations are far from sufficient to determine which model response is more plausible. Our results highlight that there remains a large uncertainty in the representation of both aerosol chemistry as well as direct and indirect aerosol radiative effects in current climate models, and reinforces that caution must be applied when interpreting the results of modelling studies of aerosol influences on climate. Model studies that implicate aerosols in climate responses should ideally explore a range of radiative forcing strengths representative of this uncertainty, in addition to thoroughly evaluating the models used against observations

The influence of remote aerosol forcing from industrialised economies on the future evolution of East and West African rainfall

Past changes in global industrial aerosol emissions have played a significant role in historical shifts in African rainfall and yet assessment of the impact on African rainfall of near term (10-40 year) potential aerosol emission pathways remains largely unexplored. Whilst existing literature links future aerosol declines to a northward shift of Sahel rainfall, existing climate projections rely on RCP scenarios that do not explore the range of air quality drivers. Here we present projections from two emission scenarios that better envelope the range of potential aerosol emissions. More aggressive emission cuts results in northward shifts of the tropical rain-bands whose signal can emerge from expected internal variability on short, 10-20 year, time horizons. We also show for the first time that this northward shift also impacts East Africa, with evidence of delays to both onset and withdrawal of the Short Rains. However, comparisons of rainfall impacts across models suggest that only certain aspects of both the West and East African model responses may be robust, given model uncertainties. This work motivates the need for wider exploration of air quality scenarios in the climate science community to assess the robustness of these projected changes and to provide evidence to underpin climate adaptation in Africa. In particular, revised estimates of emission impacts of legislated measures every 5-10 years would have a value in providing near term climate adaptation information for African stakeholders