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New research highlights the key role of ozone in climate change
http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/new-research-highlights-the-key-role-of-ozone-in-climate-change[font face=Serif][font size=5]New research highlights the key role of ozone in climate change[/font]
[font size=4]The models which are used to predict how climate change will occur could be much improved by including the key role of ozone, which is often overlooked in current models.[/font]
[font size=3]…
Using a comprehensive atmosphere-ocean chemistry-climate model, the Cambridge team, working with researchers from the University of East Anglia, the National Centre for Atmospheric Science, the Met Office and the University of Reading, compared ozone at pre-industrial levels with how it evolves in response to a quadrupling of CO2 in the atmosphere, which is a standard climate change experiment.
What they discovered is a reduction in global surface warming of approximately 20% – equating to 1° Celsius – when compared with most models after 75 years. This difference is due to ozone changes in the lower stratosphere in the tropics, which are mainly caused by changes in the atmospheric circulation under climate change.
“This research has shown that ozone feedback can play a major role in global warming and that it should be included consistently in climate models,” said Nowack. “These models are incredibly complex, just as the Earth is, and there are an almost infinite number of different processes which we could include. Many different processes have to be simplified in order to make them run effectively within the model, but what this research shows is that ozone feedback plays a major role in climate change, and therefore should be included in models in order to make them as accurate as we can make them. However, this particular feedback is especially complex since it depends on many other climate processes that models still simulate differently. Therefore, the best option to represent this feedback consistently might be to calculate ozone changes in every model, in spite of the high computational costs of such a procedure.”
“The results reported here do not imply that climate change ceases to be an issue: rather that the sorts of impacts predicted by recent UN IPCC reports for later this century may be delayed - and even then by only by a few years,” said Dr Manoj Joshi of the University of East Anglia, one of the paper's co-authors.
…
The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page. For image rights, please see the credits associated with each individual image.[/font][/font]
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2451[font size=4]The models which are used to predict how climate change will occur could be much improved by including the key role of ozone, which is often overlooked in current models.[/font]
[font size=3]…
Using a comprehensive atmosphere-ocean chemistry-climate model, the Cambridge team, working with researchers from the University of East Anglia, the National Centre for Atmospheric Science, the Met Office and the University of Reading, compared ozone at pre-industrial levels with how it evolves in response to a quadrupling of CO2 in the atmosphere, which is a standard climate change experiment.
What they discovered is a reduction in global surface warming of approximately 20% – equating to 1° Celsius – when compared with most models after 75 years. This difference is due to ozone changes in the lower stratosphere in the tropics, which are mainly caused by changes in the atmospheric circulation under climate change.
“This research has shown that ozone feedback can play a major role in global warming and that it should be included consistently in climate models,” said Nowack. “These models are incredibly complex, just as the Earth is, and there are an almost infinite number of different processes which we could include. Many different processes have to be simplified in order to make them run effectively within the model, but what this research shows is that ozone feedback plays a major role in climate change, and therefore should be included in models in order to make them as accurate as we can make them. However, this particular feedback is especially complex since it depends on many other climate processes that models still simulate differently. Therefore, the best option to represent this feedback consistently might be to calculate ozone changes in every model, in spite of the high computational costs of such a procedure.”
“The results reported here do not imply that climate change ceases to be an issue: rather that the sorts of impacts predicted by recent UN IPCC reports for later this century may be delayed - and even then by only by a few years,” said Dr Manoj Joshi of the University of East Anglia, one of the paper's co-authors.
…
The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page. For image rights, please see the credits associated with each individual image.[/font][/font]
