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- Blichner, Sara M., et al.
(författare)
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Implementing a sectional scheme for early aerosol growth from new particle formation in the Norwegian Earth System Model v2 : Comparison to observations and climate impacts
- 2021
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Ingår i: Geoscientific Model Development. - : Copernicus GmbH. - 1991-959X .- 1991-9603. ; 14:6, s. 3335-3359
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Aerosol-cloud interactions contribute to a large portion of the spread in estimates of climate forcing, climate sensitivity and future projections. An important part of this uncertainty is how much new particle formation (NPF) contributes to cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) and, furthermore, how this changes with changes in anthropogenic emissions. Incorporating NPF and early growth in Earth system models (ESMs) is, however, challenging due to uncertain parameters (e.g. participating vapours), structural issues (numerical description of growth from ∼ 1 to ∼ 100 nm) and the large scale of an ESM grid compared to the NPF scale. A common approach in ESMs is to represent the particle size distribution by a certain number of log-normal modes. Sectional schemes, on the other hand, in which the size distribution is represented by bins, are considered closer to first principles because they do not make an a priori assumption about the size distribution. In order to improve the representation of early growth, we have implemented a sectional scheme for the smallest particles (5-39.6 nm diameter) in the Norwegian Earth System Model (NorESM), feeding particles into the original aerosol scheme. This is, to our knowledge, the first time such an approach has been tried. We find that including the sectional scheme for early growth improves the aerosol number concentration in the model when comparing against observations, particularly in the 50-100 nm diameter range. Furthermore, we find that the model with the sectional scheme produces much fewer particles than the original scheme in polluted regions, while it produces more in remote regions and the free troposphere, indicating a potential impact on the estimated aerosol forcing. Finally, we analyse the effect on cloud-aerosol interactions and find that the effect of changes in NPF efficiency on clouds is highly heterogeneous in space. While in remote regions, more efficient NPF leads to higher cloud droplet number concentration (CDNC), in polluted regions the opposite is in fact the case.
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2. |
- Lewinschal, Anna, et al.
(författare)
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Local and remote temperature response of regional SO2 emissions
- 2019
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Ingår i: Atmospheric Chemistry And Physics. - : Copernicus GmbH. - 1680-7316 .- 1680-7324. ; 19:4, s. 2385-2403
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Short-lived anthropogenic climate forcers (SLCFs), such as sulfate aerosols, affect both climate and air quality. Despite being short-lived, these forcers do not affect temperatures only locally; regions far away from the emission sources are also affected. Climate metrics are often used in a policy context to compare the climate impact of different anthropogenic forcing agents. These metrics typically relate a forcing change in a certain region with a temperature change in another region and thus often require a separate model to convert emission changes to radiative forcing (RF) changes. In this study, we used a coupled Earth system model, NorESM (Norwegian Earth System Model), to calculate emission-to-temperature-response metrics for sulfur dioxide (SO2) emission changes in four different policy-relevant regions: Europe (EU), North America (NA), East Asia (EA) and South Asia (SA). We first increased the SO2 emissions in each individual region by an amount giving approximately the same global average radiative forcing change (-0.45 Wm(-2)). The global mean temperature change per unit sulfur emission compared to the control experiment was independent of emission region and equal to similar to 0.006 K(TgSyr(-1))(-1). On a regional scale, the Arctic showed the largest temperature response in all experiments. The second largest temperature change occurred in the region of the imposed emission increase, except when South Asian emissions were changed; in this experiment, the temperature response was approximately the same in South Asia and East Asia. We also examined the non-linearity of the temperature response by removing all anthropogenic SO2 emissions over Europe in one experiment. In this case, the temperature response (both global and regional) was twice that in the corresponding experiment with a European emission increase. This non-linearity in the temperature response is one of many uncertainties associated with the use of simplified climate metrics.
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3. |
- Sand, Maria, et al.
(författare)
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Surface temperature response to regional black carbon emissions : do location and magnitude matter?
- 2020
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Ingår i: Atmospheric Chemistry And Physics. - : Copernicus GmbH. - 1680-7316 .- 1680-7324. ; 20:5, s. 3079-3089
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Aerosol radiative forcing can influence climate both locally and far outside the emission region. Here we investigate black carbon (BC) aerosols emitted in four major emission areas and evaluate the importance of emission location and magnitude as well as the concept of the absolute regional temperature-change potentials (ARTP). We perform simulations with a climate model (NorESM) with a fully coupled ocean and with fixed sea surface temperatures. BC emissions for year 2000 are increased by factors of 10 and 20 in South Asia, North America, and Europe, respectively, and by 5 and 10 in East Asia (due to higher emissions there). The perturbed simulations and a reference simulation are run for 100 years with three ensemble members each. We find strikingly similar regional surface temperature responses and geographical patterns per unit BC emission in Europe and North America but somewhat lower temperature sensitivities for East Asian emissions. BC emitted in South Asia shows a different geographical pattern in surface temperatures, by changing the Indian monsoon and cooling the surface. We find that the ARTP approach rather accurately reproduces the fully coupled temperature response of NorESM. Choosing the highest emission rate results in lower surface temperature change per emission unit compared to the lowest rate, but the difference is generally not statistically significant except for the Arctic. An advantage of high-perturbation simulations is the clearer emergence of regional signals. Our results show that the linearity of normalized temperature effects of BC is fairly well preserved despite the relatively large perturbations but that regional temperature coefficients calculated from high perturbations may be a conservative estimate. Regardless of emission region, BC causes a northward shift of the ITCZ, and this shift is apparent both with a fully coupled ocean and with fixed sea surface temperatures. For these regional BC emission perturbations, we find that the effective radiative forcing is not a good measure of the climate response. A limitation of this study is the uncertainties in BC-cloud interactions and the amount of BC absorption, both of which are model dependent.
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