Biomass burning is one of the largest sources of trace gases and aerosols in the atmosphere, and has profound influence on tropospheric oxidants and radiative forcing. Using a fully coupled chemistry-climate model (GFDL AM3), the authors found that co-emission of trace gases and aerosol from present-day biomass burning increases the global tropospheric ozone burden by 5.1%, and decreases global mean OH, a major sink for methane, by 6.3%.
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GFDL Research Highlights
Future changes in wind-wave patterns have broad implications for ecosystems, as well as the design and operation of coastal, near-and-off-shore industries. Changes in response to global warming may further exacerbate the anticipated vulnerabilities of coastal regions to projected sea-level rise.
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March 4th, 2013 - Cloud tuning in a coupled climate model: impact on 20th century warming
Clouds remain one of the largest sources of uncertainty in predictions from climate models. Globally, clouds cool the Earth through the net effect of two opposing contributions: cooling from reflection of incoming solar radiation and warming from trapping of infrared radiation emitted by the Earth. By comparison, the cooling effect of clouds is estimated to be about six times larger than the warming effect resulting from the increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gases since 1750. This is why uncertainties in the representation of clouds can have considerable impact on the simulated climate.
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February 24th, 2013 - Heat stress reduces labor capacity under climate warming
The authors use existing occupational health and safety thresholds to establish a new metric to quantify a healthy, acclimated individual’s capacity to safely perform sustained labor under environmental heat stress (labor capacity). Using climate model projections, we apply this metric to quantify the direct impact of global warming on the global human population in the future.
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February 15th, 2013 - Controls of Global Snow Under a Changed Climate
Understanding snowfall variability is key to understanding future water supply in snowmelt-dominated regions, like the western U.S. This research validated GFDL’s coupled climate models, CM2.5 and CM2.1, for snowfall and explored changes in snowfall in a future climate experiment, to determine if resolution differences in the models influence snowfall signals.
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El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the dominant pattern of interannual climate variability, and has strong influence on the atmospheric circulation around the globe. North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) is another prominent mode of interannual variability in the Northern Hemisphere extratropics, and exerts a strong influence on the climate of the North Atlantic basin and the surrounding land areas. The main purpose of this study is to describe and assess of the interactions between these two prominent patterns of interannual climate variability.
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Stratosphere-to-troposphere transport of ozone is a common occurrence at mid- and high latitudes, but its influence on tropospheric ozone levels remains a long-standing question, despite decades of research. GFDL scientists and colleagues analyzed balloon soundings, lidar, surface and satellite measurements using GFDL’s new global high-resolution chemistry-climate model, to look at the extent to which naturally occurring stratospheric ozone intrusions reach the surface and affect air quality.
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January 14th, 2013 - Have Aerosols Caused the Observed Atlantic Multi-decadal Variability?
Identifying the main drivers of the twentieth-century multi-decadal variability in the Atlantic Ocean is crucial for predicting how the Atlantic will evolve in the coming decades and the resulting broad impacts on weather and precipitation patterns around the globe. A paper recently published in Nature from the Met Office Hadley Centre suggested that aerosols are a prime driver of twentieth-century North Atlantic climate variability, based on simulations using the HadGEM2-ES (UK Met Office Hadley Centre Earth System Model).
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This collaboration, led by NOAA and EPA scientists and entraining expertise from the University of Connecticut, evaluated the potential effects of climate change on cusk (Brosme brosme) in the Northwest Atlantic. Numbers of this demersal (bottom-dwelling) fish (Fig. 1) on the Northeast Atlantic continental shelf have declined dramatically over the past several decades. This is believed to be primarily a result of fishing activities. However, changes in the distribution and abundance of a number of marine fish stocks in the Northwest Atlantic have been linked to climate variability and change, suggesting that both fishing and climate may affect the future status of cusk. Read More…
November 28th, 2012 - Connecting changing ocean circulation with changing climate
Our capability to observe ocean changes has improved dramatically over the past two decades, motivating interest in how these observations can be used to constrain climate change simulations. Projections of future surface climate change and ocean circulation change are both very uncertain. This research shows that circulation changes are important to the surface climate change and we describe a mechanism for the connection. Read More…