Anthropogenic and natural aerosols play key roles in driving climate change over a range of spatial and temporal scales, both close to emission sources and also remotely through teleconnections. Aerosols can directly interact with radiation by scattering and absorption and indirectly through modulating cloud properties, and thereby modify the surface and atmospheric energy balance, cloud dynamics and precipitation patterns, and the atmospheric and oceanic circulation. Changes in regional aerosol emissions accelerate greenhouse gas-driven climate changes in some regions, counteract them in others, and may interact with natural variability to further stress human and ecological systems. However, our understanding of these impacts still lags those due to greenhouse gases. The poor aerosol integration in many climate risk and impact studies currently leads to potentially dangerous omissions in projections of near-term climate change impacts.
This session addresses: the strong and spatially complex trends in temperature, hydroclimate, air quality, and extreme events driven by aerosol changes over the historical era, and those expected in the near future; the interplay between aerosol-driven changes and those induced by other forcing factors; and their extensions to climate risk and impact studies. We encourage contributions based on model and observation-based approaches to investigate the effects of aerosols on regional decadal climate variability and extremes, tropical-extratropical interactions and teleconnections, and the interactions with modes of variability such as the NAO, ENSO, AMV, and PDO. This year we especially welcome analyses using the RAMIP dataset. We also welcome focused studies on monsoon systems, midlatitude and Arctic responses, extreme temperature and precipitation, atmospheric and oceanic circulation changes, tropical cyclones, and daily variability, using for example CMIP6 projections, large ensemble simulations, or specifically designed experiments. We also encourage studies focusing on climate risk and concrete regional impacts on nature and society resulting from changes in anthropogenic and natural aerosol emissions.