Project FOCI - Non-CO2 Forcers and Their Climate, Weather, Air Quality and Health Impacts: Chemistry – Climate Interactions over Scales

While overall the global warming with the causes and global processes connected to well-mixed CO2, and its impacts on global to continental scales are well understood with a high level of confidence, there are knowledge gaps concerning the impact of many other non-CO2 radiative forcers leading to low confidence in the conclusions. This relates mainly to specific anthropogenic and natural precursor emissions of short-lived GHGs and aerosols and their precursors. These gaps and uncertainties also exist in their subsequent effects on atmospheric chemistry and climate, through direct emissions dependent on changes in e.g., agriculture production and technologies based on scenarios for future development as well as feedbacks of global warming on emissions, e.g., permafrost thaw. 

The main goal of EC HE project FOCI, is to assess impacts of key radiative forcers abd the processes of their impact on the climate system, to find and test an efficient implementation of these processes into global ESMs and into RCMs coupled with CTMs, and finally to use the tools developed to investigate mitigation and/or adaptation policies incorporated in selected scenarios of future development targeted at Europe and other regions of the world. We are developing new regionally tuned scenarios based on improved emissions to assess the effects of non-CO2 forcers. 

Overall introduction to coupled RCM-CTM modelling experiment strategies and evaluation simulations will be presented in addition to the contemporary status of the project. Historical simulations results are validated against reanalyses data and the assessment of impact of chemistry involvement is shown. We will show the results for regional and local conditions in high resolution for City of Prague.