AerChemMIP

Goal

Past climate change has been forced by a wide range of chemically reactive gases, aerosols, and well mixed greenhouse gases (WMGHGs), in addition to CO2. Scientific questions and uncertainties regarding chemistry-climate interactions range from regional scales (e.g., tropospheric ozone and aerosols interacting with regional meteorology), to long-range connections (e.g., hemispheric transport of air pollution, the impacts of lower stratospheric ozone and temperatures on surface climate), to global integration (e.g., the lifetimes of CH4 and N2O).

AerChemMIP proposes to contribute to CMIP6 through the following: 1) diagnose forcings and feedbacks involving NTCFs, (namely tropospheric aerosols, tropospheric O3 precursors, and CH4) and the chemically reactive WMGHGs (e.g., N2O, also CH4, and some halocarbons including impacts on stratospheric O3), 2) document and understand past and future changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere, and 3) estimate the global-to-regional climate response from these changes. The AerChemMIP Tier 1 simulations focus primarily on understanding atmospheric composition changes (from NTCFs and other chemically-active anthropogenic gases) and their impact on climate. We have devised a series of experiments that contrast the forcing of various NTCFs with that of WMGHGs in historical and future climate change. In addition, the proposed chemistry-climate simulations will enable diagnosis of changes in regional air quality (AQ) through its coupling to large-scale changes in O3-CH4-PM2.5. We will work in collaboration with RFMIP and DAMIP to provide a comprehensive analysis of ERF and the regionally-resolved climate forcing signature from tropospheric NTCFs. For some of the specifically attributable climate forcings, in particular those at the 10s of mW m-2 level, the actual climate change will be difficult to detect in a transient simulation or even a time slice of several decades. AerChemMIP is a joint, consolidated effort for CMIP6 from two international communities -- Aerosol Comparisons between Observations and Models (AeroCom, http://aerocom.met.no/Welcome.html) and the IGAC/SPARC Chemistry-Climate Model Initiative (CCMI, http://www.met.reading.ac.uk/ccmi/). Experiments suggested for CCMI Phase 2 [Eyring et al., 2013b], which are traditionally run using chemistry-climate models (CCMs) with mostly prescribed sea surface temperatures and sea ice concentrations, complement this set of AerChemMIP/CMIP6 experiments. Further experiments in AeroCom phase III aim to understand sensitivity of aerosol forcing to aerosol formation and loss processes. We do not specifically consider the very long-lived F-gases (SF6, PFCs, and some HFCs) as their abundance is not affected by chemistry on a century time scale.**

Experiments Tier 1

All Experiments

Data Protocol

SSG

Links