Air pollution impacts weather and climate, but just how much? Europe’s leading scientists on aerosol and clouds have joined forces to uncover a dominant source of uncertainty in climate science.
The Earth is warming more rapidly than before, and extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and more intense. While global warming is mainly driven by carbon dioxide emissions, it is also influenced by air pollution. Three research projects, funded by the European Commission and the European Space Agency (ESA), have now teamed up to find out just how much of the current record global temperatures are influenced by particles in the air. The answers they find are expected to improve the predictions of the pace and regional patterns of climate change in the future.
– Pollution in the shape of tiny airborne particles impacts how sunlight and heat are reflected or absorbed in the atmosphere. The challenge is that we don’t know exactly how much, said Ulas Im, senior researcher at Aarhus University in Denmark.
Together with some of Europe’s leading experts on aerosol-cloud-interactions, Im explains this challenge in a newly published paper in the scientific journal AGU Advances: Aerosol-cloud interactions: Overcoming a barrier to projecting near-term climate evolution and risk. A policy brief directed towards European policymakers stresses the need to invest in research to reduce uncertainties in aerosol-cloud interactions to enhance the ability to project near-term climate changes, strengthen resilience to extreme events and support effective mitigation strategies.
– It is crucial to understand aerosol-cloud interactions so we understand how much of the recent warming stems from different levels of aerosols in the air and how much comes from greenhouse gas emissions. This is of course important knowledge for policymakers. Lack of this knowledge complicates estimates and assessments, and, on a regional level, prevents projections of rainfall, monsoons and extreme weather, making it hard to plan mitigation and adaptation, Im continued.
The two EU-funded projects CleanCloud and CERTAINTY and the ESA-funded project AIRSENSE already work to answer these questions together, as part of a cluster of projects that work together as part of the EC-ESA Earth System Science Initiative. By teaming up in a cluster, the aim is to close knowledge gaps and accelerate scientific breakthroughs.
– This collaboration signifies a step change in what we can provide to society. Climate models are used to make decisions about the future, and by making them more accurate we will improve knowledge about how we best can protect ourselves, crops, livelihoods, infrastructure and more, against future extreme events, said Jennie Thomas, project coordinator of CERTAINTY.