Climate processes

Abstract:

Black carbon (BC) aerosol loadings were measured during the High-performance Instrumented Airborne Platform for Environmental Research Pole-to-Pole Observations (HIPPO) campaign above the remote Pacific from 85°N to 67°S. Over 700 vertical profiles extending from near the surface to max ∼14 km altitude were obtained with a single-particle soot photometer between early 2009 and mid-2011. The data provides a climatology of BC in the remote regions that reveals gradients of BC concentration reflecting global-scale transport and removal of pollution. BC is identified as a sensitive tracer of extratropical mixing into the lower tropical tropopause layer and trends toward surprisingly uniform loadings in the lower stratosphere of ∼1 ng/kg. The climatology is compared to predictions from the AeroCom global model intercomparison initiative. The AeroCom model suite overestimates loads in the upper troposphere/lower stratosphere (∼10×) more severely than at lower altitudes (∼3×), with bias roughly independent of season or geographic location; these results indicate that it overestimates BC lifetime. Key Points A BC climatology is provided for the remote Pacific and Polar regions AeroCom overestimates remote BC with strong altitude dependence Extratropical mixing into the TTL is estimated from BC latitudinal gradients ©2013 The Authors. Geophysical Research Letters published by Wiley on behalf of the American Geophysical Union.

Abstract:

This study uses the UK Chemistry and Aerosols community model (UKCA) within the Hadley Centre Global Environmental Model (HadGEM3), coupled for the first time to an explicit aerosol activation parameterisation, and hence known as UKCA-Activate. We explore the range of uncertainty in estimates of the indirect aerosol effects attributable to the choice of parameterisation of the subgrid-scale variability of vertical velocity in HadGEM-UKCA. Results of simulations demonstrate that the use of a characteristic vertical velocity cannot replicate results derived with a distribution of vertical velocities, and is to be discouraged in GCMs. This study focuses on the effect of the variance (σw2) of a Gaussian pdf (probability density function) of vertical velocity. Fixed values of σw (spanning the range measured in situ by nine flight campaigns found in the literature) and a configuration in which σw depends on turbulent kinetic energy are tested. Results from the mid-range fixed σw and TKE-based configurations both compare well with observed vertical velocity distributions and cloud droplet number concentrations. The radiative flux perturbation due to the total effects of anthropogenic aerosol is estimated at −1.9 W m−2 with σw = 0.1 m s−1, −2.1 W m−2 with σw derived from TKE, −2.25 W m−2 with σw = 0.4 m s−1, and −2.3 W m−2 with σw = 0.7 m s−1. The breadth of this range is 0.4 W m−2, which is comparable to a substantial fraction of the total diversity of current aerosol forcing estimates. Reducing the uncertainty in the parameterisation of σw would therefore be an important step towards reducing the uncertainty in estimates of the indirect aerosol effects. Detailed examination of regional radiative flux perturbations reveals that aerosol microphysics can be responsible for some climate-relevant radiative effects, highlighting the importance of including microphysical aerosol processes in GCMs.

Abstract:

Abstract. Evaluation of the aerosol schemes in current climate models is dependent upon the available observational data. In-situ observations from flight campaigns can provide valuable data about the vertical distribution of aerosol that is difficult to obtain from satellite or ground-based platforms, although they are localised in space and time. Using single-particle soot-photometer (SP2) measurements from the HIAPER Pole-to-Pole Observations (HIPPO) campaign, which consists of many vertical profiles over a large region of the Pacific, we evaluate the meridional and vertical distribution of black carbon (BC) aerosol simulated by the HadGEM3–UKCA and ECHAM5–HAM2 models. Both models show a similar pattern of overestimating the BC column burden compared to that derived from the observations, in many areas by an order of magnitude. However, by sampling the simulated BC mass mixing ratio along the flight track and comparing to the observations, we show that this discrepancy has a rather different vertical structure in the two models: in HadGEM3–UKCA the discrepancy is dominated by excess aerosol in the tropical upper troposphere, while in ECHAM5–HAM2 areas of discrepancy are spread across many different latitudes and altitudes. Using this methodology, we conduct sensitivity tests on two specific elements of the models: biomass-burning emissions and scavenging by convective precipitation. We show that, by coupling the convective scavenging more tightly with convective transport, both the column burden and vertical distribution of BC in HadGEM3–UKCA are much improved with respect to the observations, with a substantial and statistically significant increase in correlation – this demonstrates the importance of a realistic representation of this process. In contrast, updating from GFED2 to GFED3.1 biomass-burning emissions makes a more modest improvement in both models, which is not statistically significant. By comparing our results with a more traditional approach using regional- and monthly-mean vertical profile curves, we show that the point-by-point analysis allows the model improvements to be demonstrated more clearly. We also demonstrate the important role that nudged simulations (where the large-scale model dynamics are continuously relaxed towards a reanalysis) can play in this type of evaluation, allowing statistically significant differences between configurations of the aerosol scheme to be seen where the differences between the corresponding free-running simulations would not be significant.