Arctic Air Pollution: Origins and Impacts

Law, Kathy S.; Stohl, Andreas

doi:10.1126/science.1137695

Cited by 486 publications

(495 citation statements)

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“…While in earlier studies on Arctic Haze (Rahn, 1981;Barrie, 1986;Yamanouchi et al, 2005;Law and Stohl, 2007) an anthropogenic origin was already shown, several publications during recent years also revealed that biomass burning (as well forest fire as from agricultural origin) is one possibly important constituent of Arctic Haze as well (Warneke et al, 2009;Fu et al, 2009;Stohl et al, 2007). However, so far to our knowledge biomass burning aerosol has overwhelmingly been observed in summer over Spitsbergen or due to agricultural flaming in eastern Europe once in May 2006 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 84%

Springtime Arctic aerosol: Smoke versus haze, a case study for March 2008

Stock¹,

Ritter²,

Herber³

et al. 2012

Atmospheric Environment

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a b s t r a c tDuring March 2008 photometer observations of Arctic aerosol were performed both at a Russian ice-floe drifting station (NP-35) at the central Arctic ocean (56.7e42.0 E, 85.5e84.2 N) and at Ny-Ålesund, Spitsbergen (78.9 N, 11.9 E). Next to a persistent increase of AOD over NP-35, two pronounced aerosol events have been recorded there, one originating from early season forest fires close to the city of Khabarovsk ("Arctic Smoke"), the other one showed trajectories from central Russia and resembled more the classical Arctic Haze. The latter event has also been recorded two days later over Ny-Ålesund, both in photometer and lidar. From these remote sensing instruments volume distribution functions are derived and discussed. Only subtle differences between the smoke and the haze event have been found in terms of particle microphysics. Different trajectory analysis, driven by NCEP and ECMWF have been performed and compared. For the data set presented here the meteorological field, due to sparseness of data in the central Arctic, mainly limits the precision of the air trajectories.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 84%

Springtime Arctic aerosol: Smoke versus haze, a case study for March 2008

Stock¹,

Ritter²,

Herber³

et al. 2012

Atmospheric Environment

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“…Shaw, 1995;Stohl et al, 2006). Ozone and aerosols are the main short-lived species transported toward the Arctic that impact significantly the climate of this region, modifying regionally the radiative balance of the atmosphere (Law and Stohl, 2007). Ozone is a strong greenhouse gas, inducing a positive radiative forcing and causing a regional increase of the surface temperature (Shindell et al, 2006).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Boreal and temperate snow cover variations induced by black carbon emissions in the middle of the 21st century

et al. 2013

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Abstract. We used a coupled climate-chemistry model to quantify the impacts of aerosols on snow cover north of 30 • N both for the present-day and for the middle of the 21st century. Black carbon (BC) deposition over continents induces a reduction in the mean number of days with snow at the surface (MNDWS) that ranges from 0 to 10 days over large areas of Eurasia and Northern America for the presentday relative to the pre-industrial period. This is mainly due to BC deposition during the spring, a period of the year when the remaining of snow accumulated during the winter is exposed to both strong solar radiation and a large amount of aerosol deposition induced themselves by a high level of transport of particles from polluted areas. North of 30 • N, this deposition flux represents 222 Gg BC month −1 on average from April to June in our simulation. A large reduction in BC emissions is expected in the future in all of the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenarios. In particular, considering the RCP8.5 in our simulation leads to a decrease in the spring BC deposition down to 110 Gg month −1 in the 2050s. However, despite the reduction of the aerosol impact on snow, the MNDWS is strongly reduced by 2050, with a decrease ranging from 10 to 100 days from presentday values over large parts of the Northern Hemisphere. This reduction is essentially due to temperature increase, which is quite strong in the RCP8.5 scenario in the absence of climate mitigation policies. Moreover, the projected sea-ice retreat in the next decades will open new routes for shipping in the Arctic. However, a large increase in shipping emissions in the Arctic by the mid-21st century does not lead to significant changes of BC deposition over snow-covered areas in our simulation. Therefore, the MNDWS is clearly not affected through snow darkening effects associated with these Arctic ship emissions. In an experiment without nudging toward atmospheric reanalyses, we simulated however some changes of the MNDWS considering such aerosol ship emissions. These changes are generally not statistically significant in boreal continents, except in Quebec and in the West Siberian plains, where they range between −5 and −10 days. They are induced both by radiative forcings of the aerosols when they are in the snow and in the atmosphere, and by all the atmospheric feedbacks. These experiments do not take into account the feedbacks induced by the interactions between ocean and atmosphere as they were conducted with prescribed sea surface temperatures. Climate change by the mid-21st century could also cause biomass burning activity (forest fires) to become more intense and occur earlier in the season. In an idealised scenario in which forest fires are 50 % stronger and occur 2 weeks earlier and later than at present, we simulated an increase in spring BC deposition of 21 Gg BC month −1 over continents located north of 30 • N. This BC deposition does not impact directly the snow cover through snow darkening effects. However, in an experiment considering ...

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“…Amongst these is the importance of the formation of isoprene (and isoprene oxidation product) nitrates for remote tropospheric ozone burdens. These nitrates are of a sufficient lifetime to undergo transport and hence affect concentrations some distance from emission source areas (von Kuhlmann et al, 2004;Ito et al, 2007;Law and Stohl, 2007;Young et al, 2009). They therefore have the potential to cause remote regional changes in climate but it is not known if this potential is realised.…”

Section: Biological Emission Of Reactive Carbon and Nitrogenmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The arctic appears particularly vulnerable to aerosols (Garrett and Zhao, 2006), transported, for instance, from boreal forest fires or agricultural burning in parts of Europe and northern Asia (Generoso et al, 2007;Stohl, 2006). The deposition of black carbon on ice and snow has a large effect in terms of radiative forcing and this could accelerate regional warming and trigger important biophysical (albedo) and biogeochemical (release of soil and peat carbon) feedbacks in the climate system (Law and Stohl, 2007;Quinn et al, 2008). A second region that shows potential sensitivity to aerosols is Australia (Rotstayn et al, 2007) where increasing rainfall over northwest of the continent has been linked to Asian aerosol emissions.…”

Section: Fire and Emissions Of Chemicals And Aerosolsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Regionalizing global climate models

Pitman

Arneth

Ganzeveld

2011

Intl Journal of Climatology

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Global climate models simulate the Earth's climate impressively at scales of continents and greater. At these scales, large-scale dynamics and physics largely define the climate. At spatial scales relevant to policy makers, and to impacts and adaptation, many other processes may affect regional and local climate and perhaps trigger teleconnections that provide significant feedbacks on the global climate. These processes include fire, irrigation, land cover change (including crops and urban landscapes), and the emissions of biogenic volatile organic compounds by vegetation. Many of these interact within the atmosphere via dynamical, physical, and chemical mechanisms that lead to boundary-layer feedbacks. It is unlikely that any of these processes have a significant global-scale impact on the Earth's climate in the sense that the amount of warming due to a doubling of well mixed greenhouse gases would change if these processes were explicitly represented in climate models. These phenomena are usually local in space (e.g. urban) or in time (e.g. fire) and probably do not provide the on-going and sustained forcing to affect the global climate. However, for most impacts and adaptation research it is the regional and local climate that defines climate risk. At these scales, processes missing in climate models can have a substantially larger local-scale impact than the additional radiative forcing due to increasing greenhouse gases. Thus, while climate models are well designed for global and continental scales they exclude a suite of important processes that are locally and/or regionally important. We review these missing processes and highlight the research required to resolve the representation of these regional-scale processes in climate models. We also discuss the experimental methodology required to rigorously determine whether these processes are restricted to a local or regional-scale role or whether they do trigger robust teleconnections that would demonstrate global-scale significance.

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Arctic Air Pollution: Origins and Impacts

Cited by 486 publications

References 50 publications

Springtime Arctic aerosol: Smoke versus haze, a case study for March 2008

Springtime Arctic aerosol: Smoke versus haze, a case study for March 2008

Boreal and temperate snow cover variations induced by black carbon emissions in the middle of the 21st century

Regionalizing global climate models

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