By: Nicolas Bellouin
Aerosols are tiny liquid or solid particles suspended in the Earth’s atmosphere. Some aerosols form naturally, like the sea spray emitted by breaking waves, the mineral dust that form sandstorms, or smoke from wildfires. But human activities, from combustion of fossil fuels, cement manufacturing, fertilisers, and agricultural and forest clearing fires also emit aerosols into the atmosphere.
Once in the atmosphere, aerosols affect the energy budget of the Earth by reflecting and absorbing sunlight. They also play an important role in the formation of liquid clouds, and aerosols from human activities lead to the formation of more reflective clouds, which may also have a different liquid water content or be slower to rain out. The extent to which aerosols from human activities modify the energy budget of the Earth is measured by a quantity called aerosol radiative forcing.
Scientists have studied aerosols for a long time. Their role in the formation of fog was identified by the Scottish meteorologist John Aitken in 1880. In the 1960s and 1970s, scientists observed ships making clouds thicker (the so-called ship tracks) and paper mills affecting precipitation downwind of their location. But the global extent of aerosol perturbations was only revealed during the 1980s and 1990s when ground-based observations networks, aircraft campaigns, and satellite instruments tremendously increased our ability to observe aerosol properties.
Figure 1: Distributions of aerosol optical depth, a measure of aerosol loading of the atmosphere, as estimated in (left) 1984 based on knowledge of the time; and (right) 2019 based on a numerical model of atmospheric composition that ingests satellite observations of aerosols.
Figure 1 shows how understanding of global aerosol patterns has dramatically improved thanks to better observations and better models of aerosol sources, transport, and removal. The research done over the past 40 years identified aerosol sources and their variability, characterised the wide spectrum of aerosol properties as they “age” in the atmosphere, and discovered the complexity of the natural atmosphere.
Figure 2: Uncertainty ranges for aerosol radiative forcing from interactions with radiation (ari, left in blue columns) and interactions with clouds (aci, right in orange columns) in past Assessment Reports (AR) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The first report did not quantify aerosol radiative forcing but noted that it was potentially substantial.
That improved understanding quickly translated into the first estimates of aerosol radiative forcing, but progress then seemed to stall. Figure 2 shows estimates of the uncertainty ranges of aerosol radiative forcing as assessed by successive reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Despite the large, international intellectual effort dedicated to observing, understanding, and modelling the impact of aerosols on climate, uncertainty in aerosol radiative forcing has not changed much over the past decades.
Over the past year, I have led more than 30 colleagues, each bringing complementary expertise in the many ways we observe and model aerosols, to review the scientific literature on aerosol radiative forcing. Our aim was to take a fresh and comprehensive look at present understanding of aerosol radiative forcing and identify prospects for progress on some of the most pressing open questions. On 1 November 2019, the scientific journal Reviews of Geophysics published a preliminary version of our review article .
We found that important aerosol radiative forcing mechanisms are getting better constrained. The balance between aerosol reflection and absorption of sunlight, and the degree to which aerosols from human activities increase the number of liquid cloud droplets, are now well understood. In addition, a series of recent observations, including from volcanic eruptions, found that cloud liquid water content was less sensitive to aerosol perturbations than previously thought.
But important gaps in our understanding remain and those gaps explain why uncertainty in aerosol radiative forcing remains large. Some of the most important research questions are:
- What were the aerosols levels before industrialisation dramatically increased human emissions? How polluted was the natural atmosphere by wildfires and emissions from plants, deserts, and oceans? Those questions are difficult because preindustrial aerosols have not been observed, and numerical models incompletely represent the sources and properties of natural aerosols.
- Do aerosol perturbations increase cloud fraction, as predicted by large-scale models of the atmosphere? Or is the picture more nuanced, as suggested by satellite observations or predicted by smaller-scale, more detailed models? Those questions are difficult because cloud fraction is a poorly-defined quantity and depends on the scale at which clouds are observed and simulated.
- Do ice clouds respond to perturbations of aerosol amounts by human emissions? And if so, what is the associated radiative forcing? Those questions are difficult because ice crystal number is poorly observed, and aerosol-ice interactions are not well understood theoretically.
To quantify the remaining uncertainties, my colleagues and I worked out that aerosol radiative forcing offset at least a fifth and up to half of the radiative forcing by greenhouse gases, with 2 chances out of 3 that the right answer lies between those two bounds. We also identified new approaches that hold great promise to make further progress:
- Statistical methods to compare multiple model configurations to better, more numerous observations improves our understanding of the sources of uncertainty in models.
- Increases in computing power allow simulations of the whole atmosphere with detailed models of aerosol-cloud interactions, which better represent subtle processes.
- Natural laboratories like volcanic eruptions and ship tracks provide opportunities to understand aerosol perturbations of ice clouds.
- Analyses of sediments to find traces of ancient charcoal give unprecedented insights into past fire activity.
- Observed changes in surface temperature, ocean heat content, or sunlight levels at the surface can be used to constrain aerosol radiative forcing. The use of differences between the two hemispheres, or between time periods where aerosol pollution increases or decreases, may make those inferences stronger.
Attempting to quantify aerosol radiative forcing has given us fascinating insights into the atmosphere of our planet and its climate system. Many questions remain wide open and provide much to excite the curiosity of the best physicists, chemists, and mathematicians. If a new group of aerosol scientists repeats our review in 10 years’ time, I hope they will be able to marvel at the progress accomplished.
References:
Bellouin, N., Quaas, J., Gryspeerdt, E., Kinne, S., Stier, P., Watson‐Parris, D., et al (2019). Bounding global aerosol radiative forcing of climate change. Reviews of Geophysics, 57. https://doi.org/10.1029/2019RG000660
Tanre, D., J.-F. Geleyn, and J. Slingo (1984), First results of the introduction of an advanced aerosol-radiation interaction in the ECMWF low resolution global model, in Aerosols and Their Climatic Effects, edited by H. Gerber and A. Deepak, pp. 133–177, A. Deepak, Hampton,Va.
Inness, A., Ades, M., Agustí-Panareda, A., Barré, J., Benedictow, A., Blechschmidt, A.-M., Dominguez, J. J., Engelen, R., Eskes, H., Flemming, J., Huijnen, V., Jones, L., Kipling, Z., Massart, S., Parrington, M., Peuch, V.-H., Razinger, M., Remy, S., Schulz, M., and Suttie, M.: The CAMS reanalysis of atmospheric composition, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 19, 3515–3556, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-3515-2019, 2019.