3D Modeling of Supersaturated H2O/H2O2 on Early Mars Climate during the Noachia

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antony Delavois ◽  
François Forget ◽  
Martin Turbet ◽  
Ehouarn Millour

<p>The climate of Mars during its first billion years is one of the most intriguing question in our understanding of the Solar System. The planet was host of a large amount of liquid water flowing on the surface throughout the Noachian era, approximatively 4Gya. Geomorphological observations is the main evidence for liquid water since valley networks and lakes are still visible on the surface, although dry nowadays.</p> <p>Different studies have tried to reproduce the conditions that may have occured on the planet, trying to find an atmospheric process or composition that could solve the Faint Young Sun Paradox. Theses modeling studies, through the use of 3-dimensional Global Climate Models struggled to warm sufficiently the past climate of Mars, even considering different greenhouse gases, the role of clouds, meteoritic impact or even volcanism (XXX). However, the presence of H2 could be an interesting solution for a sustainable warming as some recent studies suggest (Turbet and Forget, 2021). Another recent study (Ito et al. 2020) suggested that H2O2 might be a convincing candidate but has to be in high supersaturation ratio in the atmosphere, even though it only used a simplified 1D model and relatively high supersaturation levels.</p> <p>We try here to explore more in detail the scenario of supersaturated H2O2 and H2O, that also might be a specy able to provide a sufficient global warming under supersaturated conditions or through the formation of high altitude clouds. Since H2O is the major source of H2O2 in the atmosphere, it is important to assess whether the H2O content in the atmosphere is enough to provide high quantities of H2O2. We also try to constrain the theoritical supersaturation level of H2O/H2O2 that will allow the warming of the climate above 273K, but with a detailled 3D GCM simulation. Even if we do not tackle the question whether the supersaturation hypothesis is realistic or not, these results give a better understanding of  what would be Early Mars' climate under such conditions.</p>

2005 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-1
Author(s):  
DAVID WALTON

Recently hearing Fred Singer from the USA lecture on what he perceives to be the uncritical ways in which global change has been attributed to anthropogenic effects reminded me of the importance we should attach to those who question our current beliefs. For Fred it was not sufficient that the IPCC had engaged many of the best scientific brains in the world to reach the existing consensus; they might all be wrong because the original question or assumption was wrong. Fred was strongly challenged by the audience of Antarctic scientists, not least because some of his quotations were selective in order to initiate discussion. And we know that there are areas of considerable weakness amongst the several proxies used to compute the rate of temperature change, that we have only poorly quantified and modelled the role of clouds, energy transfer between the oceans and atmosphere, water vapour as a greenhouse gas and that we have yet to be certain that the Global Climate Models really do have all the most significant driving variables. So the IPCC conclusions are drawn on the best available evidence with complementary patterns derived from several different approaches and constitute the best we can do at the moment.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Terando ◽  
David Reidmiller ◽  
Steven W. Hostetler ◽  
Jeremy S. Littell ◽  
T. Douglas Beard ◽  
...  

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (10) ◽  
pp. 1441-1462
Author(s):  
Leah Birch ◽  
Timothy Cronin ◽  
Eli Tziperman

Abstract. Over the past 0.8 million years, 100 kyr ice ages have dominated Earth's climate with geological evidence suggesting the last glacial inception began in the mountains of Baffin Island. Currently, state-of-the-art global climate models (GCMs) have difficulty simulating glacial inception, possibly due in part to their coarse horizontal resolution and the neglect of ice flow dynamics in some models. We attempt to address the role of regional feedbacks in the initial inception problem on Baffin Island by asynchronously coupling the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model, configured as a high-resolution inner domain over Baffin and an outer domain incorporating much of North America, to an ice flow model using the shallow ice approximation. The mass balance is calculated from WRF simulations and used to drive the ice model, which updates the ice extent and elevation, that then serve as inputs to the next WRF run. We drive the regional WRF configuration using atmospheric boundary conditions from 1986 that correspond to a relatively cold summer, and with 115 kya insolation. Initially, ice accumulates on mountain glaciers, driving downslope ice flow which expands the size of the ice caps. However, continued iterations of the atmosphere and ice models reveal a stagnation of the ice sheet on Baffin Island, driven by melting due to warmer temperatures at the margins of the ice caps. This warming is caused by changes in the regional circulation that are forced by elevation changes due to the ice growth. A stabilizing feedback between ice elevation and atmospheric circulation thus prevents full inception from occurring.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hao Wang ◽  
Minghuai Wang ◽  
Daniel Rosenfeld ◽  
Yannian Zhu ◽  
Zhibo Zhang

<p>Representing subgrid variability of cloud properties has always been a challenge in global climate models (GCMs). In microphysics schemes, the effects of subgrid cloud variability on warm rain process rates calculated based on mean cloud properties are usually accounted for by scaling process rates by an enhancement factor (EF) that is derived from the subgrid variance of cloud water. In our study, we find that the EF derived from Cloud Layers Unified by Binormals (CLUBB) in Community Earth System Model Version 2 (CESM2) is severely overestimated in most of the oceanic areas, which leads to the strong overestimation in the autoconversion rate. Through an EF formula based on empirical fitting of MODIS, we improve the EF in the liquid phase clouds. Results show that the model has a more reasonable relationship between autoconversion rate, cloud liquid water content (LWC), and droplet number concentration (CDNC) in warm rain simulation. The annual mean liquid cloud fraction (LCF), liquid water path (LWP), and CDNC show obvious increases for marine stratocumulus, where the probability of precipitation (POP) shows an obvious decrease. The annual mean LCF, cloud optical thickness (COT), and shortwave cloud forcing (SWCF) match better with observation. The sensitivity of LWP to aerosol decreases obviously. The sensitivities of LCF, LWP, cloud top droplet effective radius (CER), and COT to aerosol are in better agreement with MODIS, but the model still underestimates the response of cloud albedo to aerosol. These results indicate the importance of representing reasonable subgrid cloud variabilities in the simulation of cloud properties and aerosol-cloud interaction in climate models.</p>


2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Enrico Scoccimarro ◽  
Silvio Gualdi ◽  
Antonella Sanna ◽  
Edoardo Bucchignani ◽  
Myriam Montesarchio

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mateusz Taszarek ◽  
John T. Allen ◽  
Mattia Marchio ◽  
Harold E. Brooks

AbstractGlobally, thunderstorms are responsible for a significant fraction of rainfall, and in the mid-latitudes often produce extreme weather, including large hail, tornadoes and damaging winds. Despite this importance, how the global frequency of thunderstorms and their accompanying hazards has changed over the past 4 decades remains unclear. Large-scale diagnostics applied to global climate models have suggested that the frequency of thunderstorms and their intensity is likely to increase in the future. Here, we show that according to ERA5 convective available potential energy (CAPE) and convective precipitation (CP) have decreased over the tropics and subtropics with simultaneous increases in 0–6 km wind shear (BS06). Conversely, rawinsonde observations paint a different picture across the mid-latitudes with increasing CAPE and significant decreases to BS06. Differing trends and disagreement between ERA5 and rawinsondes observed over some regions suggest that results should be interpreted with caution, especially for CAPE and CP across tropics where uncertainty is the highest and reliable long-term rawinsonde observations are missing.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lennart Quante ◽  
Sven N. Willner ◽  
Robin Middelanis ◽  
Anders Levermann

AbstractDue to climate change the frequency and character of precipitation are changing as the hydrological cycle intensifies. With regards to snowfall, global warming has two opposing influences; increasing humidity enables intense snowfall, whereas higher temperatures decrease the likelihood of snowfall. Here we show an intensification of extreme snowfall across large areas of the Northern Hemisphere under future warming. This is robust across an ensemble of global climate models when they are bias-corrected with observational data. While mean daily snowfall decreases, both the 99th and the 99.9th percentiles of daily snowfall increase in many regions in the next decades, especially for Northern America and Asia. Additionally, the average intensity of snowfall events exceeding these percentiles as experienced historically increases in many regions. This is likely to pose a challenge to municipalities in mid to high latitudes. Overall, extreme snowfall events are likely to become an increasingly important impact of climate change in the next decades, even if they will become rarer, but not necessarily less intense, in the second half of the century.


Water ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (13) ◽  
pp. 1819
Author(s):  
Eleni S. Bekri ◽  
Polychronis Economou ◽  
Panayotis C. Yannopoulos ◽  
Alexander C. Demetracopoulos

Freshwater resources are limited and seasonally and spatially unevenly distributed. Thus, in water resources management plans, storage reservoirs play a vital role in safeguarding drinking, irrigation, hydropower and livestock water supply. In the last decades, the dams’ negative effects, such as fragmentation of water flow and sediment transport, are considered in decision-making, for achieving an optimal balance between human needs and healthy riverine and coastal ecosystems. Currently, operation of existing reservoirs is challenged by increasing water demand, climate change effects and active storage reduction due to sediment deposition, jeopardizing their supply capacity. This paper proposes a methodological framework to reassess supply capacity and management resilience for an existing reservoir under these challenges. Future projections are derived by plausible climate scenarios and global climate models and by stochastic simulation of historic data. An alternative basic reservoir management scenario with a very low exceedance probability is derived. Excess water volumes are investigated under a probabilistic prism for enabling multiple-purpose water demands. Finally, this method is showcased to the Ladhon Reservoir (Greece). The probable total benefit from water allocated to the various water uses is estimated to assist decision makers in examining the tradeoffs between the probable additional benefit and risk of exceedance.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jun Yang ◽  
Maigeng Zhou ◽  
Zhoupeng Ren ◽  
Mengmeng Li ◽  
Boguang Wang ◽  
...  

AbstractRecent studies have reported a variety of health consequences of climate change. However, the vulnerability of individuals and cities to climate change remains to be evaluated. We project the excess cause-, age-, region-, and education-specific mortality attributable to future high temperatures in 161 Chinese districts/counties using 28 global climate models (GCMs) under two representative concentration pathways (RCPs). To assess the influence of population ageing on the projection of future heat-related mortality, we further project the age-specific effect estimates under five shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs). Heat-related excess mortality is projected to increase from 1.9% (95% eCI: 0.2–3.3%) in the 2010s to 2.4% (0.4–4.1%) in the 2030 s and 5.5% (0.5–9.9%) in the 2090 s under RCP8.5, with corresponding relative changes of 0.5% (0.0–1.2%) and 3.6% (−0.5–7.5%). The projected slopes are steeper in southern, eastern, central and northern China. People with cardiorespiratory diseases, females, the elderly and those with low educational attainment could be more affected. Population ageing amplifies future heat-related excess deaths 2.3- to 5.8-fold under different SSPs, particularly for the northeast region. Our findings can help guide public health responses to ameliorate the risk of climate change.


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