EGU21-14417, updated on 04 Mar 2021
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-14417
EGU General Assembly 2021
© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

The local and remote atmospheric impacts of Africa’s 21st century aerosol emission trajectory

Chris Wells1 and Apostolos Voulgarakis1,2
Chris Wells and Apostolos Voulgarakis
  • 1Atmospheric Physics, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom (c.wells17@imperial.ac.uk)
  • 2School of Environmental Engineering, Technical University of Crete, Chania, Greece

Aerosols are a major climate forcer, but their historical effect has the largest uncertainty of any forcing; their mechanisms and impacts are not well understood. Due to their short lifetime, aerosols have large impacts near their emission region, but they also have effects on the climate in remote locations. In recent years, studies have investigated the influences of regional aerosols on global and regional climate, and the mechanisms that lead to remote responses to their inhomogeneous forcing. Using the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway scenarios (SSPs), transient future experiments were performed in UKESM1, testing the effect of African emissions following the SSP3-RCP7.0 scenario as the rest of the world follows SSP1-RCP1.9, relative to a global SSP1-RCP1.9 control. SSP3 sees higher direct anthropogenic aerosol emissions, but lower biomass burning emissions, over Africa. Experiments were performed changing each of these sets of emissions, and both. A further set of experiments additionally accounted for changing future CO2 concentrations, to investigate the impact of CO2 on the responses to aerosol perturbations. Impacts on radiation fluxes, temperature, circulation and precipitation are investigated, both over the emission region (Africa), where microphysical effects dominate, and remotely, where dynamical influences become more relevant. 

How to cite: Wells, C. and Voulgarakis, A.: The local and remote atmospheric impacts of Africa’s 21st century aerosol emission trajectory, EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-14417, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-14417, 2021.

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