Short-lived Climate Forcers Research Articles

A new lightning scheme in the Canadian Atmospheric Model (CanAM5.1): implementation, evaluation, and projections of lightning and fire in future climates

Abstract. Lightning is an important atmospheric process for generating reactive nitrogen, resulting in the production of tropospheric ozone, as well as igniting wildland fires, which result in potentially large emissions of many pollutants and short-lived climate forcers. Lightning is also expected to change in frequency and location with the changing climate. As such, lightning is an important component of Earth system models. Until now, the Canadian Earth System Model (CanESM) did not contain an interactive-lightning parameterization. The fire parameterization in CanESM5.1 was designed to use prescribed monthly climatological lightning. In this study, we have added a logistical regression lightning model that predicts lightning occurrence interactively based on three environmental variables and their interactions in CanESM5.1's atmospheric model, CanAM5.1 (Canadian Atmospheric Model), creating the capacity to interactively model lightning, allowing for future projections under different climate scenarios. The modelled lightning and resulting burned area were evaluated against satellite measurements over the historical period, and model biases were found to be acceptable. Modelled lightning had a small negative bias and excellent land–ocean ratio compared to satellite measurements. The modified version of CanESM5.1 was used to simulate two future climate scenarios (SSP2-4.5 and SSP5-8.5; Shared Socioeconomic Pathway) to assess how lightning and burned area change in the future. Under the higher-emissions scenario (SSP5-8.5), CanESM5.1 predicts almost no change to the global mean lightning flash rate by the end of the century (2081–2100 vs. 2015–2035 average). However, there are substantial regional changes to lightning – particularly over land – such as a mean increase of 6 % in the northern mid-latitudes and decrease of −8 % in the tropics. By the century's end, the change in global total burned area with prescribed climatological lightning was about 2 times greater than that with interactive lightning (42 % vs. 26 % increase, respectively). Conversely, in the northern mid-latitudes the use of interactive lightning resulted in 3 times more burned area compared to that with unchanging lightning (48 % vs. 16 % increase, respectively). These results show that the future changes to burned area are greatly dependent on a model's lightning scheme, both spatially and overall.

Exploring putative enteric methanogenesis inhibitors using molecular simulations and a graph neural network.

Atmospheric methane (CH4) acts as a key contributor to global warming. As CH4 is a short-lived climate forcer (12 years atmospheric lifespan), its mitigation represents the most promising means to address climate change in the short term. Enteric CH4 (the biosynthesized CH4 from the rumen of ruminants) represents 5.1% of total global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, 23% of emissions from agriculture, and 27.2% of global CH4 emissions. Therefore, it is imperative to investigate methanogenesis inhibitors and their underlying modes of action. We hereby elucidate the detailed biophysical and thermodynamic interplay between anti-methanogenic molecules and cofactor F430 of methyl coenzyme M reductase and interpret the stoichiometric ratios and binding affinities of sixteen inhibitor molecules. We leverage this as prior in a graph neural network to first functionally cluster these sixteen known inhibitors among ~54,000 bovine metabolites. We subsequently demonstrate a protocol to identify precursors to and putative inhibitors for methanogenesis, based on Tanimoto chemical similarity and membrane permeability predictions. This work lays the foundation for computational and de novo design of inhibitor molecules that retain/ reject one or more biochemical properties of known inhibitors discussed in this study.

Source identification of carbon monoxide over the greater Tokyo area: Tower measurement network and evaluation of global/regional model simulations at different resolutions

Because of its relatively long lifetime among short-lived climate forcers in the atmosphere, carbon monoxide (CO) is utilized as a tracer, and is expected to be simulated at coarse resolution. To better grasp the behavior of CO in the atmosphere, multi-altitude measurement is required because the main sources of CO emissions are automobiles (surface) and industry (aloft). In this work, using CO measurements obtained at remote sites and through a tower measurement network in Japan (37 m and 250 m above ground level (AGL) in an urban area, and 32 m AGL at a rural site in the greater Tokyo area), the performances of a global model (2° × 2.5°) and a regional model at various resolutions (12, 4, and 1.3 km) were comprehensively evaluated. The global model successfully simulated CO at remote sites but not for high-concentration peaks at rural and urban sites, whereas the regional model increasingly improved its performance in capturing CO peaks at urban sites with resolutions up to 4 km. Therefore, we concluded that a 4 km resolution was suitable for capturing CO at urban sites, and furthermore estimated the source contributions. The regions surrounding the greater Tokyo area were dominated by the concentration from the lateral boundaries (approximately 180 ppbv), while the higher CO in central Tokyo was attributed to local sources. These local sources accounted for up to 80% of the annual average at the surface level and just 10% aloft (corresponding to the 250 m AGL site). Sensitivity simulations assessing CO sources (automobiles, industry, and others) demonstrated the important role of automobiles, while higher altitudes had more sources attributed to industry. Local sources were found to make more prominent contributions at higher concentration ranges. The appropriate modeling resolution for CO behavior can be drawn from our findings and the usefulness of simultaneous measurements at the surface level and using a tower for capturing the three-dimensional CO structure can be demonstrated as an important approach.

Resetting tropospheric OH and CH4 lifetime with ultraviolet H2O absorption.

The decay of methyl chloroform, a banned ozone-depleting substance, has provided a clear observational metric of mean tropospheric hydroxyl radical (OH) abundance. Almost all current global chemistry models calculate about 15% too much OH and thus too rapid methane loss. Methane is a short-lived climate forcer, critical to achieving global warming targets, and this error affects our model projections of climate change. New observations of water vapor absorption in the ultraviolet region (290 to 350 nanometers) imply reductions in sunlight with key photolysis rates decreasing by 8 to 12% in the near-surface tropical atmosphere. Incorporation of this new mechanism in a chemistry-transport model reduces OH and methane loss by only 4%, but combined with other proposed mechanisms, such as tropospheric halogen chemistry (7%), we may be able to resolve this conundrum.

Natural Aerosols, Gaseous Precursors and Their Impacts in Greece: A Review from the Remote Sensing Perspective

The Mediterranean, and particularly its Eastern basin, is a crossroad of air masses advected from Europe, Asia and Africa. Anthropogenic emissions from its megacities meet over the Eastern Mediterranean, with natural emissions from the Saharan and Middle East deserts, smoke from frequent forest fires, background marine and pollen particles emitted from ocean and vegetation, respectively. This mixture of natural aerosols and gaseous precursors (Short-Lived Climate Forcers—SLCFs in IPCC has short atmospheric residence times but strongly affects radiation and cloud formation, contributing the largest uncertainty to estimates and interpretations of the changing cloud and precipitation patterns across the basin. The SLCFs’ global forcing is comparable in magnitude to that of the long-lived greenhouse gases; however, the local forcing by SLCFs can far exceed those of the long-lived gases, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Monitoring the spatiotemporal distribution of SLCFs using remote sensing techniques is important for understanding their properties along with aging processes and impacts on radiation, clouds, weather and climate. This article reviews the current state of scientific know-how on the properties and trends of SLCFs in the Eastern Mediterranean along with their regional interactions and impacts, depicted by ground- and space-based remote sensing techniques.

Indicators of Global Climate Change 2023: annual update of key indicators of the state of the climate system and human influence

Abstract. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessments are the trusted source of scientific evidence for climate negotiations taking place under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Evidence-based decision-making needs to be informed by up-to-date and timely information on key indicators of the state of the climate system and of the human influence on the global climate system. However, successive IPCC reports are published at intervals of 5–10 years, creating potential for an information gap between report cycles. We follow methods as close as possible to those used in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) Working Group One (WGI) report. We compile monitoring datasets to produce estimates for key climate indicators related to forcing of the climate system: emissions of greenhouse gases and short-lived climate forcers, greenhouse gas concentrations, radiative forcing, the Earth's energy imbalance, surface temperature changes, warming attributed to human activities, the remaining carbon budget, and estimates of global temperature extremes. The purpose of this effort, grounded in an open-data, open-science approach, is to make annually updated reliable global climate indicators available in the public domain (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11388387, Smith et al., 2024a). As they are traceable to IPCC report methods, they can be trusted by all parties involved in UNFCCC negotiations and help convey wider understanding of the latest knowledge of the climate system and its direction of travel. The indicators show that, for the 2014–2023 decade average, observed warming was 1.19 [1.06 to 1.30] °C, of which 1.19 [1.0 to 1.4] °C was human-induced. For the single-year average, human-induced warming reached 1.31 [1.1 to 1.7] °C in 2023 relative to 1850–1900. The best estimate is below the 2023-observed warming record of 1.43 [1.32 to 1.53] °C, indicating a substantial contribution of internal variability in the 2023 record. Human-induced warming has been increasing at a rate that is unprecedented in the instrumental record, reaching 0.26 [0.2–0.4] °C per decade over 2014–2023. This high rate of warming is caused by a combination of net greenhouse gas emissions being at a persistent high of 53±5.4 Gt CO2e yr−1 over the last decade, as well as reductions in the strength of aerosol cooling. Despite this, there is evidence that the rate of increase in CO2 emissions over the last decade has slowed compared to the 2000s, and depending on societal choices, a continued series of these annual updates over the critical 2020s decade could track a change of direction for some of the indicators presented here.

Critical Sensing Modalities for Hydrogen: Technical Needs and Status of the Field to Support a Changing Energy Landscape.

Decarbonization of the energy system is a key aspect of the energy transition. Energy storage in the form of chemical bonds has long been viewed as an optimal scheme for energy conversion. With advances in systems engineering, hydrogen has the potential to become a low cost, low emission, energy carrier. However, hydrogen is difficult to contain, it exhibits a low flammability limit (>40000 ppm or 4%), low ignition energy (0.02 mJ), and it is a short-lived climate forcer. Beyond commercially available sensors to ensure safety through spot checks in enclosed environments, new sensors are necessary to support the development of low emission infrastructure for production, transmission, storage, and end use. Efficient scalable broad area hydrogen monitoring motivates lowering the detection limit below that (10 ppm) of best in class commercial technologies. In this perspective, we evaluate recent advances in hydrogen gas sensing to highlight technologies that may find broad utility in the hydrogen sector. It is clear in the near term that a sensor technology suite is required to meet the variable constraints (e.g., power, size/weight, connectivity, cost) that characterize the breadth of the application space, ranging from industrial complexes to remote pipelines. This perspective is not intended to be another standard hydrogen sensor review, but rather provide a critical evaluation of technologies with detection limits preferably below 1 ppm and low power requirements. Given projections for rapid market growth, promising techniques will also be amenable to rapid development in technical readiness for commercial deployment. As such, methods that do not meet these requirements will not be considered in depth.

Significant changes in the physicochemical properties of BC-containing particles during the cold season in Beijing

The ambient air quality has improved significantly under strict emission controls in Beijing, China over the last decade. Black carbon (BC), as a short-lived climate forcer in ambient aerosols, profoundly impacts the air quality and climate. Previous studies have demonstrated a decline in the mass concentration of BC. In this study, we characterized the chemical compositions and size distributions of BC-containing particles during the cold season of 2022 in Beijing using state-of-the-art instruments capable of exclusively measuring BC-containing particles. The optical properties of BC-containing particles were further calculated based on the Mie theory. Moreover, we compared the properties of BC-containing particles in 2022 with the results of previous studies. The results showed that the diameters of BC cores became larger while the coating thickness of BC-containing particles became thinner in 2022. For the coating materials, the mass fraction of nitrate increased obviously, and even replaced organic matter as the dominant component during the peak of the pollution period. Variations in chemical compositions and size distributions resulted in lower mass absorption cross-sections (MAC) of BC-containing particles from 10.5 ± 1.1 m2/g in 2016 to 7.3 ± 0.8 m2/g in 2022, reduced by 30.5%. Our results demonstrate the synergistic benefits of air pollution control in improving air quality and mitigating climate change. Therefore, the MAC of BC adopted in climate models should vary with the changing air pollution levels. This study emphasizes that it is imperative to conduct long-term observations of BC-containing particles to better estimate BC's climate effects.

Field evidence of brown carbon absorption enhancement linked to organic nitrogen formation in Indo-Gangetic Plain

Atmospheric brown carbon (BrC), a short-lived climate forcer, absorbs solar radiation and is a substantial contributor to the warming of the Earth's atmosphere. BrC composition, its absorption properties, and their evolution are poorly represented in climate models, especially during atmospheric aqueous events such as fog and clouds. These aqueous events, especially fog, are quite prevalent during wintertime in Indo-Gangetic Plain (IGP) and involve several stages (e.g., activation, formation, and dissipation, etc.), resulting in a large variation of relative humidity (RH) in the atmosphere. The huge RH variability allowed us to examine the evolution of water-soluble brown carbon (WS-BrC) diurnally and as a function of aerosol liquid water content (ALWC) and RH in this study. We explored links between the evolution of WS-BrC mass absorption efficiency at 365 nm (MAEWS-BrC-365) and chemical characteristics, viz., low-volatility organics and water-soluble organic nitrogen (WSON) to water-soluble organic carbon (WSOC) ratio (org-N/C), in the field (at Kanpur in central IGP) for the first time worldwide. We observed that WSON formation governed enhancement in MAEWS-BrC-365 diurnally (except during the afternoon) in the IGP. During the afternoon, the WS-BrC photochemical bleaching dwarfed the absorption enhancement caused by WSON formation. Further, both MAEWS-BrC-365 and org-N/C ratio increased with a decrease in ALWC and RH in this study, signifying that evaporation of fog droplets or bulk aerosol particles accelerated the formation of nitrogen-containing organic chromophores, resulting in the enhancement of WS-BrC absorptivity. The direct radiative forcing of WS-BrC relative to that of elemental carbon (EC) was ∼19 % during wintertime in Kanpur, and ∼ 40 % of this contribution was in the UV-region. These findings highlight the importance of further examining the links between the evolution of BrC absorption behavior and chemical composition in the field and incorporating it in the BrC framework of climate models to constrain the predictions.

Evaluating modelled tropospheric columns of CH4, CO, and O3 in the Arctic using ground-based Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) measurements

Abstract. This study evaluates tropospheric columns of methane, carbon monoxide, and ozone in the Arctic simulated by 11 models. The Arctic is warming at nearly 4 times the global average rate, and with changing emissions in and near the region, it is important to understand Arctic atmospheric composition and how it is changing. Both measurements and modelling of air pollution in the Arctic are difficult, making model validation with local measurements valuable. Evaluations are performed using data from five high-latitude ground-based Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometers in the Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Composition Change (NDACC). The models were selected as part of the 2021 Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) report on short-lived climate forcers. This work augments the model–measurement comparisons presented in that report by including a new data source: column-integrated FTIR measurements, whose spatial and temporal footprint is more representative of the free troposphere than in situ and satellite measurements. Mixing ratios of trace gases are modelled at 3-hourly intervals by CESM, CMAM, DEHM, EMEP MSC-W, GEM-MACH, GEOS-Chem, MATCH, MATCH-SALSA, MRI-ESM2, UKESM1, and WRF-Chem for the years 2008, 2009, 2014, and 2015. The comparisons focus on the troposphere (0–7 km partial columns) at Eureka, Canada; Thule, Greenland; Ny Ålesund, Norway; Kiruna, Sweden; and Harestua, Norway. Overall, the models are biased low in the tropospheric column, on average by −9.7 % for CH4, −21 % for CO, and −18 % for O3. Results for CH4 are relatively consistent across the 4 years, whereas CO has a maximum negative bias in the spring and minimum in the summer and O3 has a maximum difference centered around the summer. The average differences for the models are within the FTIR uncertainties for approximately 15 % of the model–location comparisons.

Drivers controlling black carbon temporal variability in the lower troposphere of the European Arctic

Abstract. Black carbon (BC) is a short-lived climate forcer affecting the Arctic climate through multiple mechanisms, which vary substantially from winter to summer. Several models still fail in reproducing BC seasonal variability, limiting the ability to fully describe BC climate implications. This study aims at gaining insights into the mechanisms controlling BC transport from lower latitudes to the Arctic lower troposphere. Here we investigate the drivers controlling black carbon daily and seasonal variability in the Arctic using generalized additive models (GAMs). We analysed equivalent black carbon (eBC) concentrations measured at the Gruvebadet Atmospheric Laboratory (GAL – Svalbard archipelago) from March 2018 to December 2021. The eBC showed a marked seasonality with higher values in winter and early spring. The eBC concentration averaged 22 ± 20 ng m−3 in the cold season (November–April) and 11 ± 11 ng m−3 in the warm season (May–October). The seasonal and interannual variability was mainly modulated by the efficiency of wet scavenging removal during transport towards higher latitudes. Conversely, the short-term variability was controlled by boundary layer dynamics as well as local-scale and synoptic-scale circulation patterns. During both the cold and warm seasons, the transport of air masses from Europe and northern Russia was an effective pathway for the transport of pollution to the European Arctic. Finally, in the warm season we observed a link between the intrusion of warm air from lower latitudes and the increase in eBC concentration. Changes in the synoptic-scale circulation system and precipitation rate in the Northern Hemisphere, linked to climate change, are expected to modify the BC burden in the Arctic.

Investigation of spatial and temporal variability in lower tropospheric ozone from RAL Space UV–Vis satellite products

Abstract. Ozone is a potent air pollutant in the lower troposphere and an important short-lived climate forcer (SLCF) in the upper troposphere. Studies using satellite data to investigate spatiotemporal variability of troposphere ozone (TO3) have predominantly focussed on the tropospheric column metric. This is the first study to investigate long-term spatiotemporal variability in lower tropospheric column ozone (LTCO3, surface–450 hPa sub-column) by merging multiple European Space Agency–Climate Change Initiative (ESA-CCI) products produced by the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) Space. We find that in the LTCO3, the degree of freedom of signal (DOFS) from these products varies with latitude range and season and is up to 0.8, indicating that the retrievals contain useful information on lower TO3. The spatial and seasonal variation of the RAL Space products are in good agreement with each other, but there are systematic offsets of up to 3.0–5.0 DU between them. Comparison with ozonesondes shows that the Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment (GOME-1, 1996–2003), the SCanning Imaging Absorption spectroMeter for Atmospheric CartograpHY (SCIAMACHY, 2003–2010) and the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI, 2005–2017) have stable LTCO3 records over their respective periods, which can be merged together. However, GOME-2 (2008–2018) shows substantial drift in its bias with respect to ozonesondes. We have therefore constructed a robust merged data set of LTCO3 from GOME-1, SCIAMACHY and OMI between 1996 and 2017. Comparing the LTCO3 differences between the 1996–2000 and 2013–2017 5-year averages, we find sizeable positive increases (3.0–5.0 DU) in the tropics/sub-tropics, while in the northern mid-latitudes, we find small-scale differences in LTCO3. Therefore, we conclude that there has been a substantial increase in tropical/sub-tropical LTCO3 during the satellite era, which is consistent with tropospheric column ozone (TCO3) records from overlapping time periods (e.g. 2005–2016).

Aerosol absorption using in situ filter-based photometers and ground-based sun photometry in the Po Valley urban atmosphere

Abstract. Light-absorbing aerosols (LAAs) are short-lived climate forcers with a significant impact on Earth's radiative balance. LAAs include dust aerosols, black carbon (BC) and organic light-absorbing carbonaceous aerosol (collectively termed brown carbon, BrC), which have also been proven to be highly toxic. In this study, aerosol absorption at five wavelengths (ranging from ultraviolet to infrared) was monitored continuously using filter-based photometers during two winter seasons in 2020 and 2021 in the city of Modena (southern central Po Valley, northern Italy), at two regulatory air quality monitoring sites, along with other pollutants (coarse particulate matter, PM10; fine particulate matter, PM2.5; O3; NO; NO2; and C6H6) and the vehicular traffic rate. The aerosol optical depth (AOD) and other column aerosol optical properties were concurrently monitored at four wavelengths by an AErosol RObotic NETwork (AERONET) sun photometer under urban background conditions within Modena. In situ absorption levels were apportioned to both sources (fossil fuel and biomass burning) and species (BC and BrC), while columnar absorption was apportioned to BC, BrC and mineral dust. The combined analysis of the atmospheric aerosol and gas measurements and of the meteorological conditions (in situ and from the ERA5 reanalysis) identified the location of potential urban sources of BC and BrC, most likely related to traffic and biomass burning. In situ data show different diurnal/weekly patterns for BrC from biomass burning and BC from traffic, with minor differences between the background and the urban traffic conditions. AERONET version 3 absorption aerosol optical depth (AAOD) retrievals at four wavelengths allowed the estimation of the absorptive direct radiative effect due to LAAs over the same period under the reasonable assumption that the AOD signal is concentrated within the mixing layer. AERONET retrievals showed a modest correlation of columnar absorption with planetary boundary layer (PBL)-scaled in situ observations, although the correlation improved significantly during a desert dust transport event that affected both in situ aerosol and columnar absorption, particularly in the blue spectrum range. A low correlation occurred between the contribution of BrC to aerosol absorption for the in situ and the columnar observations, with the BrC contribution being generally larger for in situ observations. Finally, evidence of a highly layered atmosphere during the study period, featuring significant spatial mixing and modest vertical mixing, was shown by ERA5-based atmospheric temperature profiles and by the large correlation of concurrent AERONET AOD retrievals in Modena and in Ispra (on the northwestern side of the Po Valley, ca. 225 km from Modena).

Arctic Tropospheric Ozone Trends

AbstractObserved trends in tropospheric ozone, an important air pollutant and short‐lived climate forcer (SLCF), are estimated using available surface and ozonesonde profile data for 1993–2019, using a coherent methodology, and compared to modeled trends (1995–2015) from the Arctic Monitoring Assessment Program SLCF 2021 assessment. Increases in observed surface ozone at Arctic coastal sites, notably during winter, and concurrent decreasing trends in surface carbon monoxide, are generally captured by multi‐model median trends. Wintertime increases are also estimated in the free troposphere at most Arctic sites, with decreases during spring months. Winter trends tend to be overestimated by the multi‐model medians. Springtime surface ozone increases in northern coastal Alaska are not simulated while negative springtime trends in northern Scandinavia are not always reproduced. Possible reasons for observed changes and model performance are discussed including decreasing precursor emissions, changing ozone dry deposition, and variability in large‐scale meteorology.

20 Methane Accounting and Its Importance to the Beef industry’s Implied Contribution to Climate Warming

Abstract At 27% of U.S. methane (CH4) emissions (3% of U.S. total emissions), enteric CH4 emissions represent the largest source of U.S. CH4 emissions, surpassing natural gas systems according to the latest report from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Total manure CH4 emissions represent 1% of total U.S. emissions. Enteric and manure CH4 emissions from the beef industry represent 2.1% and 0.03%, respectively, of U.S. total emissions. These contributions of CH4 emissions to total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions are determined by relating CH4 emissions to a carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent basis (CO2-e) by multiplying the amount of CH4 emissions by its global warming potential (EPA uses 25 for CH4 on a 100-y basis; GWP100). The GWP100 method was adopted following the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, and ever since this time its appropriateness for short-lived climate forcers (SLCF; e.g., CH4 has a 12-y atmospheric lifespan) has been debated. This debate exists because GWP100 is a misnomer, as it is known to have no relationship with the contribution of a gas to warming. Since CH4 is a SLCF, when emission rates are decreasing there is a decreasing concentration of CH4 in the atmosphere. To account for SLCF, an alternative accounting methodology, termed GWP-star (GWP*), has been proposed to convert SLCF to a CO2-warming equivalence (CO2-we). The CO2-we values from GWP* methodology has been demonstrated to closely relate to warming contributions compared with the CO2-e value from the GWP100 method. Applying the GWP* metric to enteric and manure CH4 emissions from the beef industry reduces the implied contribution to climate warming of these emission sources by 92% and 62%, on average from 2010-2020, respectively, compared with the GWP100 methodology. There are currently promising mitigation technologies emerging for mitigating enteric CH4 emission. For example 3-nitrooxypropanol may reduce enteric CH4 by 30% and Asparagopsis seaweed may reduce it by 80%. We explored the effects of these technologies on CO2-we if they had 100% adoption by the beef industry and if these mitigation potentials were consistent across all production systems (admittedly a big assumption). Both technologies would result in negative CO2-we for 20-y, after which a new baseline would be achieved and the CH4 emissions would begin contributing to warming again (i.e., accumulating CH4 in the atmosphere). During the 20-y of net-cooling, a 30% and 80% reduction in enteric CH4 would result in -143 (3% of U.S. total CO2 emissions) and -461 (10% of U.S. total CO2 emissions) million metric tons of CO2-we/y, respectively. Ultimately, adopting GWP* not only provides estimates that actually relate to contributions to climate warming, therefore providing a more appropriate metric than what is currently used, but also provides a means for the beef industry to leverage mitigation strategies to be a solution for climate change.

Zero-shot learning of aerosol optical properties with graph neural networks

Black carbon (BC), a strongly absorbing aerosol sourced from combustion, is an important short-lived climate forcer. BC’s complex morphology contributes to uncertainty in its direct climate radiative effects, as current methods to accurately calculate the optical properties of these aerosols are too computationally expensive to be used online in models or for observational retrievals. Here we demonstrate that a Graph Neural Network (GNN) trained to predict the optical properties of numerically-generated BC fractal aggregates can accurately generalize to arbitrarily shaped particles, including much larger (10times) aggregates than in the training dataset. This zero-shot learning approach could be used to estimate single particle optical properties of realistically-shaped aerosol and cloud particles for inclusion in radiative transfer codes for atmospheric models and remote sensing inversions. In addition, GNN’s can be used to gain physical intuition on the relationship between small-scale interactions (here of the spheres’ positions and interactions) and large-scale properties (here of the radiative properties of aerosols).

The impact of fossil jet fuel emissions at altitude on climate change: A life cycle assessment study of a long-haul flight at different time horizons

Air traffic has increased by about 60% between 2011 and 2019 and climate forcers from aviation have also increased, resulting in a strong impact on climate change. It is well established that CO2 is the largest climate forcing component connected with aviation and its impact is now well calculated and documented. However, other climate forcers such as nitrogen oxides (NO and NO2), although not considered as greenhouse gases by the Kyoto Protocol, have a significant indirect impact on climate change. Post-combustion of the most common fossil fuel, Jet A-1, results in emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), water vapor (H2O), volatile organic compounds (VOCs), sulfate ions (SO42−), carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen oxides (NOx) and soot. Soot and water vapor emissions can trigger the formation of contrails-cirrus. Due to differences in lifetimes, temperature, pressure, humidity, and reactivity, all these climate forcers have not the same impact on climate change. Since 80% aviation fuel is burned during the cruise phase, this paper aims to improve the environmental assessment of the altitude emissions of the Jet A-1 fossil fuel, using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology. This method is a reference for calculating the environmental impact of air transport emissions. However, when it comes to assessing the impact of emissions at altitude, LCA models only take into account the impact of CO2 on climate change. New global warming potentials (GWP) and emission indices (EI) of climate forcing components related to air traffic were therefore included in our calculations to estimate the climate impact ICC at two different time horizons. In this paper, we show that the inclusion of non-CO2 effects results in an increase in the ICC at the 100- and 20-year THs of 115% and 517%, respectively. This considerable increase illustrates the crucial role of short-lived climate forcers that may have a greater impact when a shorter time horizon of 20 years is chosen.

Model-free daily inversion of NOx emissions using TROPOMI (MCMFE-NOx) and its uncertainty: Declining regulated emissions and growth of new sources

Current approaches to estimate NOx emissions fail to account for new and small sources, biomass burning, and sources which change rapidly in time, generally don't account for measurement error, and are either based on models, or do not consider wind, chemistry, and dynamical effects. This work introduces a new, model-free analytical environment that assimilates daily TROPOMI NO2 measurements in a mass-conserving manner, to invert daily NOx emissions. This is applied over a rapidly developing and energy-consuming region of Northwest China, specifically chosen due to substantial economic and population changes, new environmental policies, large use of coal, and access to independent emissions measurements for validation, making this region representative of many rapidly developing regions found across the Global South. This technique computes a net NOx emissions gain of 118% distributed in a see-saw manner: a more than doubling of emissions in cleaner regions, chemical plants, and regions thought to be emissions-free, combined with a more than halving of emissions in city centers and at well-regulated steel and powerplants. The results allow attribution of sources, with major contributing factors computed to be increased combustion temperature, atmospheric transport, and in-situ chemical processing. Furthermore, sensitivity runs that represent the range of uncertainties in the TROPOMI NO2 retrievals themselves are performed, and it is determined that the differences between the errors in TROPOMI NO2 lead to smaller errors in the emissions estimates, due to non-linear buffering built in from the physical bounds on the underlying physical and chemical driving factors. It is also observed that errors in the priori dataset contribute more than the uncertainties in the TROPOMI retrievals, opening a new door to recursive iteration between this approach and new emissions dataset development. It is hoped that these findings will drive a new look at emissions estimation and how it is related to remotely sensed measurements and associated uncertainties, especially applied to rapidly developing regions. This is especially important for understanding the loadings and impacts of short-lived climate forcers, and provides a bridge between remotely sensed data, measurement error, and models, while allowing for further improvement of identification of new, small, and rapidly changing sources.

Distortion of sectoral roles in climate change threatens climate goals

The longstanding method for reporting greenhouse gas emissions—carbon dioxide equivalence (CO2e)—systematically underestimates methane-dominated economic sectors' contributions to warming in the coming decades. This is because it only calculates the warming impact of a pulse of emissions over a 100-year period. For short-lived climate forcers that mostly influence the climate for a decade or two, like methane, this method masks their near-term potency. Assessing the impacts of future greenhouse gas emissions using a simple climate model reveals that midcentury warming contributions of sectors dominated by methane—agriculture, fossil fuel production and distribution, and waste—are two times higher than estimated using CO2e. The CO2e method underemphasizes the importance of reducing emissions from these sectors, and risks misaligning emissions targets with desired temperature outcomes. It is essential to supplement CO2e-derived insights with approaches that convey climate impacts of ongoing emissions over multiple timescales, and to never rely exclusively on CO2e.

Fast and slow responses of surface air temperature in China to short-lived climate forcers

Short-lived climate forcers (SLCFs), including aerosols, tropospheric ozone, and methane in this work, are attracting increasing attention because of their extensive impacts on regional climate and air pollution. To clarify the impact of controlling SLCFs in high-emission areas on regional surface air temperature (SAT), we quantified the SAT response in China due to both global and China's SLCF changes by using an aerosol–climate model. The average SAT response in China to global SLCF changes from 1850 to 2014 was −2.53 °C ± 0.52 °C, which was much stronger than the global mean SAT response (−1.85 °C ± 0.15 °C). There are two cooling centers in China, located in the northwest inland areas (NW) and southeastern areas (SE), with area mean SAT responses of −3.39 °C ± 0.70 °C and −2.43 °C ± 0.62 °C, respectively. Because the SE area has experienced greater changes in SLCFs concentrations, compared with the NW area, China's SLCFs contribute more to the SAT response in the SE (approximately 42 %) than to the SAT response in the NW (<25 %). We divided the SAT response into fast and slow components to investigate the underlying mechanisms. In the fast response, the strength of the regional SAT response was closely connected to changes in the SLCFs concentration. The prominent increase in SLCFs in the SE area reduced the surface net radiation flux (NRF), thereby decreasing the SAT by 0.44 °C ± 0.47 °C. The smaller increase in SLCFs in the NW area, compared with the SE area, resulted in a less reduction in NRF and a minor fast SAT response (−0.01 °C ± 0.76 °C). In the slow response, the SLCFs-induced increases of mid- and low-cloud cover significantly reduced the NRF, resulting in strong slow SAT responses of −3.38 °C ± 0.70 °C and −1.98 °C ± 0.62 °C in the NW and SE areas, respectively.