[1] The latest Hadley Centre climate model, HadGEM2-ES, includes Earth system components such as interactive chemistry and eight species of tropospheric aerosols. It has been run for the period 1860-2100 in support of the fifth phase of the Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5). Anthropogenic aerosol emissions peak between 1980 and 2020, resulting in a present-day all-sky top of the atmosphere aerosol forcing of −1.6 and −1.4 W m −2 with and without ammonium nitrate aerosols, respectively, for the sum of direct and first indirect aerosol forcings. Aerosol forcing becomes significantly weaker in the 21st century, being weaker than −0.5 W m −2 in 2100 without nitrate. However, nitrate aerosols become the dominant species in Europe and Asia and decelerate the decrease in global mean aerosol forcing. Considering nitrate aerosols makes aerosol radiative forcing 2-4 times stronger by 2100 depending on the representative concentration pathway, although this impact is lessened when changes in the oxidation properties of the atmosphere are accounted for. Anthropogenic aerosol residence times increase in the future in spite of increased precipitation, as cloud cover and aerosol-cloud interactions decrease in tropical and midlatitude regions. Deposition of fossil fuel black carbon onto snow and ice surfaces peaks during the 20th century in the Arctic and Europe but keeps increasing in the Himalayas until the middle of the 21st century. Results presented here confirm the importance of aerosols in influencing the Earth's climate, albeit with a reduced impact in the future, and suggest that nitrate aerosols will partially replace sulphate aerosols to become an important anthropogenic species in the remainder of the 21st century.
We document the development of the first version of the U.K. Earth System Model UKESM1.The model represents a major advance on its predecessor HadGEM2-ES, with enhancements to all component models and new feedback mechanisms. These include a new core physical model with a well-resolved stratosphere; terrestrial biogeochemistry with coupled carbon and nitrogen cycles and enhanced land management; tropospheric-stratospheric chemistry allowing the holistic simulation of radiative forcing from ozone, methane, and nitrous oxide; two-moment, five-species, modal aerosol; and ocean biogeochemistry with two-way coupling to the carbon cycle and atmospheric aerosols. The complexity of coupling between the ocean, land, and atmosphere physical climate and biogeochemical cycles in UKESM1 is unprecedented for an Earth system model. We describe in detail the process by which the coupled model was developed and tuned to achieve acceptable performance in key physical and Earth system quantities and discuss the challenges involved in mitigating biases in a model with complex connections between its components. Overall, the model performs well, with a stable pre-industrial state and good agreement with observations in the latter period of its historical simulations. However, global mean surface temperature exhibits stronger-than-observed cooling from 1950 to 1970, followed by rapid warming from 1980 to 2014. Metrics from idealized simulations show a high climate sensitivity relative to previous generations of models: Equilibrium climate sensitivity is 5.4 K, transient climate response ranges from 2.68 to 2.85 K, and transient climate response to cumulative emissions is 2.49 to 2.66 K TtC −1 . Plain Language SummaryWe describe the development and behavior of UKESM1, a novel climate model that includes improved representations of processes in the atmosphere, ocean, and on land. These processes are inter-related: For example, dust is produced on the land and blown up into the atmosphere where it affects the amount of sunlight falling on Earth. Dust can also be dissolved in the ocean, where it affects marine life. This in turn changes both the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by the ocean and the material emitted from the surface into the atmosphere, which has an affect on the formation of clouds. UKESM1 includes many processes and interactions such as these, giving it a high level of complexity. Ensuring realistic process behavior is a major challenge in the development of our model, and we have carefully tested this. UKESM1 performs well, correctly exhibiting stable results from a continuous pre-industrial simulation (used to provide a reference for future experiments) and showing good agreement
[1] Solar geoengineering-deliberate reduction in the amount of solar radiation retained by the Earth-has been proposed as a means of counteracting some of the climatic effects of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. We present results from Experiment G1 of the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project, in which 12 climate models have simulated the climate response to an abrupt quadrupling of CO 2 from preindustrial concentrations brought into radiative balance via a globally uniform reduction in insolation. Models show this reduction largely offsets global mean surface temperature increases due to quadrupled CO 2 concentrations and prevents 97% of the Arctic sea ice loss that would otherwise occur under high CO 2 levels but, compared to the preindustrial climate, leaves the tropics cooler (À0.3 K) and the poles warmer (+0.8 K). Annual mean precipitation minus evaporation anomalies for G1 are less than 0.2 mm day À1 in magnitude over 92% of the globe, but some tropical regions receive less precipitation, in part due to increased moist static stability and suppression of convection. Global average net primary productivity increases by 120% in G1 over simulated preindustrial levels, primarily from CO 2 fertilization, but also in part due to reduced plant heat stress compared to a high CO 2 world with no geoengineering. All models show that uniform solar geoengineering in G1 cannot simultaneously return regional and global temperature and hydrologic cycle intensity to preindustrial levels.
[1] Radiative forcing is a useful tool for predicting equilibrium global temperature change. However, it is not so useful for predicting global precipitation changes, as changes in precipitation strongly depend on the climate change mechanism and how it perturbs the atmospheric and surface energy budgets. Here a suite of climate model experiments and radiative transfer calculations are used to quantify and assess this dependency across a range of climate change mechanisms. It is shown that the precipitation response can be split into two parts: a fast atmospheric response that strongly correlates with the atmospheric component of radiative forcing, and a slower response to global surface temperature change that is independent of the climate change mechanism, ∼2-3% per unit of global surface temperature change. We highlight the precipitation response to black carbon aerosol forcing as falling within this range despite having an equilibrium response that is of opposite sign to the radiative forcing and global temperature change.
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