Recent acceleration of Greenland and Antarctic outlet glaciers and ice flows is closely linked to ocean warming, especially in the subsurface layer. This land ice melt will cause sea level rise.
We find that in response to an increase in atmospheric greenhouse-gas concentrations, the subsurface oceans (200-500 m) surrounding the two polar ice sheets both warm substantially more than has been observed thus far. Model projections suggest that the maximum ocean warming around Greenland will be double the global mean, whereas ocean warming around Antarctica will be only half the global mean. Read More…
Earlier generations of climate models at GFDL have specified cloud properties to be independent of atmospheric aerosol composition, despite fairly well-understood (at least for liquid clouds) dependence of cloud droplet number on aerosol composition and size distribution. Cloud drop number in turn exerts a major control on cloud radiation, notably albedo, and microphysics and macrophysics, notably cloud structure and lifetimes. Aerosol-cloud interactions are likely to be important in anthropogenic climate change. They have been difficult to incorporate in climate models because they occur at scales much smaller than resolved by climate models. CM3 parameterizes these smaller scales using probability distribution functions for motions smaller than those it explicitly resolves. Read More…
The recently developed GFDL AM3 model (Donner et. al 2011) incorporates a prognostic treatment of cloud drop number to simulate the aerosol indirect effect. The present work explores formulation sensitivities by constructing three alternate model configurations (S1, S2, S3). These alternate configurations exhibit only small differences in their present day climatology. Read More…
Though it is obvious that rainfall moistens the land surface, our scientific understanding of how land surface moisture may interact with the atmosphere to encourage or suppress subsequent rainfall is limited. Using data from the North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR, Mesinger et al., 2006), this study shows that the likelihood of afternoon rainfall in the eastern United States and Mexico is strongly linked to evaporation from the land surface earlier in the day. Read More…
The downward solar flux at the surface is an important component of the earth’s climate system, being a major factor governing the surface temperature and hydrologic cycle. The availability of derived flux climatologies from both ground-based measurements and satellite-based estimates provide a reference for properly assessing general circulation model biases, not only in the surface irradiance, but in the atmospheric factors (aerosols, clouds, and water vapor) affecting it. Read More…
Changing land-use and climate may increase biogenic isoprene emissions, which could offset the benefits from North American air pollution controls for both domestic and European air quality (surface ozone). Both anthropogenic and biogenic emission changes are reflected in peroxy acetyl nitrate (PAN), which may serve as a more effective indicator of intercontinental emission changes than ozone itself. Read More…
Biological productivity in vast regions of the oceans is known to be limited by the supply of iron, an essential nutrient to marine organisms, impacting carbon export to the ocean floor. The atmospheric source of iron originates from desert mineral dust aerosols and is converted to a bio-available form of soluble iron during transport. Little is known of the magnitude and variability of soluble iron deposition (SFeD) and the character of its transport. We have used the GFDL Global Chemical Transport Model to examine the emission of mineral dust (~3.5% Fe) during Saharan desert dust storms; the chemical processing of iron to a soluble form during transport; and the subsequent dry surface deposition and precipitation scavenging deposition to the North Atlantic Ocean. Read More…
The study by Fang et al. [2010] examines the implications of new estimates of the anthropogenic and lightning nitrogen oxide (NOx) sources for the budget of oxidized nitrogen (NOy) over the United States in summer using a 3-D global chemical transport model (MOZART-4). NOy export and burden response less than linearly to either NOx emission changes due to the NOy partitioning change and the corresponding lifetime change. Lightning NOxcontributes 24%−43% of the free tropospheric (FT) NOy export from the U.S. to the North Atlantic and 28%−34% to the NOy wet deposition over the United States. Increasing lightning NOx decreases the fractional contribution of PAN to total NOy export and decreases the FT ozone (O3) production efficiency. Therefore, a model with biased low lightning NOx would lead to biased high downwind O3 responses due to anthropogenic NOx emission regulations. Better constraints on the lightning NOx source are required to more confidently assess the impacts of anthropogenic emission regulations on air quality over downwind regions. Read More…
The results of the simulations of Austin and Wilson (2010) suggest the importance of including a coupled ocean on stratospheric processes as well as realistic bromine amounts, including the very short lived species. The figure shows the calculated area of the ozone hole (colored lines and triangles), together with observations (black triangles). With SSTs from the CM2 coupled ocean-atmosphere experiment, the simulated ozone hole (blue) tends to be slightly larger (by about 6%) than simulated with observed SSTs used as forcing (red curve and points). For the low Bromine simulation (green), which corresponds approximately to just the long lived bromine species, the ozone hole was smaller by about 10%. Recent model developments have eliminated the small but significant bias between observations and model results shown in the figure below. Read More…
Multi-variate probability density functions with dynamics (MVD PDFs) have been incorporated into the single-column version of GFDL AM3 and extended to treat aerosol activation. MVD PDFs are unique in that they predict the joint distribution of temperature, water mass, and vertical velocity. The distribution of vertical velocity is then a natural link to aerosol activation. This paper presents the first results on the effects of aerosols and precipitation on cloud fraction and cloud liquid using the MVD PDFs and the first results on cloud droplet number concentrations obtained from the distributions of vertical velocity predicted by the MVD PDFs. Read More…
