There has been growing interest in the potential of short-lived climate forcer (SLCF) mitigation to reduce near-term global warming. Black carbon (BC), organic carbon (OC), and sulfur dioxide (SO2) are SLCFs which change the Earth's radiative balance directly by affecting radiation, and indirectly by altering cloud properties. We used the ECHAM-HAMMOZ aerosol-climate model to study the radiative forcings due to mitigating the anthropogenic emissions of BC, OC, and SO2 from Chile and Mexico. Limiting our analysis to areas where these emissions had notable effects on both aerosol and clouds, we found that the total radiative forcings of anthropogenic aerosol emissions are different for Chile and Mexico. This was explained by differences in aerosol emissions, orography, and meteorology in these two countries. Especially the radiative forcing for Chilean emissions was influenced by the persistent stratocumulus cloud deck west of Chile. To reduce the uncertainty of our radiative forcing calculations, we nudged the wind and surface pressure toward pre-generated fields. As nudging affects the calculated effective radiative forcing (ERF), we here used the identifier ERFNDG. Our results indicate that the removal of OC and SO2 emissions caused a positive ERFNDG while the removal of BC emissions caused a positive ERFNDG for Chile, but a negative ERFNDG for Mexico. When accounting for co-emission of other aerosol compounds, reducing BC emissions led to positive ERFNDG in both countries. Compared to China, the removal of anthropogenic SO2 emissions in Chile and Mexico caused a much larger global average ERFNDG per emitted unit mass of SO2.

Studies of the climate effects of black carbon (BC) in East Asia are not abundant and the effects remain uncertain. Using the Community Earth System Model version 1 (CESM1) with Peking University's emissions data, the fast response of the atmospheric water cycle to anthropogenic BC during summer in East Asia is investigated in this study. Results show that the CESM1-simulated BC concentration and its direct effective radiative forcing are comparable to observations. With the combination of aerosol-radiation interaction (ARI) and non-aerosol-radiation interaction (including aerosol-cloud interaction and surface albedo effects), anthropogenic BC induces a wetter south and drier north pattern over East Asia during summer. Also, anthropogenic BC affects the summer precipitation primarily through changing moisture transport rather than altering local evaporation over East Asia. Using the self-developed atmospheric water tracer method, the responses of dominant moisture sources [the tropical Indian Ocean (TIO) and northwest Pacific] to anthropogenic BC are investigated. Results show that the moisture originating from southwest monsoon-related sources (especially the TIO) is more responsive to anthropogenic BC effects over East Asia. In particular, differing from total precipitation, TIO-supplied precipitation shows a significant response to the ARI of anthropogenic BC over East Asia. Process analyses show that anthropogenic BC affects the southwest monsoon-related moisture supplies primarily via advection, deep convection, and cloud macrophysics. Interestingly, the anthropogenic BC-induced changes of TIO-supplied water vapor in these three processes are all dominated by the ARI over East Asia.

The new Energy Exascale Earth System Model Version 1 (E3SMv1) developed for the U.S. Department of Energy has significant new treatments of aerosols and light-absorbing snow impurities as well as their interactions with clouds and radiation. This study describes seven sets of new aerosol-related treatments (involving emissions, new particle formation, aerosol transport, wet scavenging and resuspension, and snow radiative transfer) and examines how they affect global aerosols and radiative forcing in E3SMv1. Altogether, they give a reduced total aerosol radiative forcing (-1.6 W/m(2)) and sensitivity in cloud liquid water to aerosols, but an increased sensitivity in cloud droplet size to aerosols. A new approach for H2SO4 production and loss largely reduces a low bias in small particles concentrations and leads to substantial increases in cloud condensation nuclei concentrations and cloud radiative cooling. Emitting secondary organic aerosol precursor gases from elevated sources increases the column burden of secondary organic aerosol, contributing substantially to global clear-sky aerosol radiative cooling (-0.15 out of -0.5 W/m(2)). A new treatment of aerosol resuspension from evaporating precipitation, developed to remedy two shortcomings of the original treatment, produces a modest reduction in aerosols and cloud droplets; its impact depends strongly on the model physics and is much stronger in E3SM Version 0. New treatments of the mixing state and optical properties of snow impurities and snow grains introduce a positive present-day shortwave radiative forcing (0.26 W/m(2)), but changes in aerosol transport and wet removal processes also affect the concentration and radiative forcing of light-absorbing impurities in snow/ice. Plain Language Summary Aerosol and aerosol-cloud interactions continue to be a major uncertainty in Earth system models, impeding their ability to reproduce the observed historical warming and to project changes in global climate and water cycle. The U.S. DOE Energy Exascale Earth System Model version 1 (E3SMv1), a state-of-the-science Earth system model, was developed to use exascale computing to address the grand challenge of actionable predictions of variability and change in the Earth system critical to the energy sector. It has been publicly released with new treatments in many aspects, including substantial modifications to the physical treatments of aerosols in the atmosphere and light-absorbing impurities in snow/ice, aimed at reducing some known biases or correcting model deficiencies in representing aerosols, their life cycle, and their impacts in various components of the Earth system. Compared to its predecessors (without the new treatments) and observations, E3SMv1 shows improvements in characterizing global distributions of aerosols and their radiative effects. We conduct sensitivity experiments to understand the impact of individual changes and provide guidance for future development of E3SM and other Earth system models.

Modeling the aerosol lifecycle in traditional global climate models (GCM) is challenging for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the coarse grid. The multiscale modeling framework (MMF), in which a cloud resolving model replaces conventional parameterizations of cloud processes within each GCM grid column, provides a promising framework to address this challenge. Here we develop a new version of MMF that for the first time treats aerosol processes at cloud scale to improve the aerosol-cloud interaction representation in the model. We demonstrate that the model with the explicit aerosol treatments shows significant improvements of many aspects of the simulated aerosols compared to the previous version of MMF with aerosols parameterized at the GCM grid scale. The explicit aerosol treatments produce a significant increase of the column burdens of black carbon (BC), primary organic aerosol, and sulfate by up to 40% in many remote regions, a decrease of the sea-salt aerosol burdens by 40% in remote regions. These differences are caused by the differences in aerosol convective transport and wet removal between these two models. The new model also shows reduced bias of BC surface concentration in North America and BC vertical profiles in the high latitudes. However, the biased-high BC concentrations in the upper troposphere over the remote Pacific regions remain, requiring further improvements on other process representations (e.g., secondary activation neglected in the model). Plain Language Summary Most global climate models (GCMs) cannot resolve the important aerosol processes that are related to clouds and occur at cloud scale. This makes it difficult to predict the aerosol change and aerosol effects on climate. In contrast, the multi-scale modeling framework (MMF), which embeds a cloud resolving model (CRM) into each GCM grid column to resolve the cloud formation, provides a promising tool to handle this challenge. In this study, we develop a first global model explicitly representing aerosol processes at cloud scale (in each CRM grid cell) within a MMF. We found that (1) the MMF with aerosol processes explicitly represented in CRM grid cells can improve aerosol simulations in many aspects. (2) the MMF with aerosols parameterized in GCM grid cells can cause great biases in modelled aerosol distributions.

A series of 60-year numerical experiments starting from 1851 was conducted using a global climate model coupled with an aerosol-cloud-radiation model to investigate the response of the Asian summer monsoon to variations in the secondary organic aerosol (SOA) flux induced by two different estimations of biogenic volatile organic compound (BVOC) emissions. One estimation was obtained from a pre-existing archive and the other was generated by a next-generation model (the Model of Emissions of Gases and Aerosols from Nature, MEGAN). The use of MEGAN resulted in an overall increase of the SOA production through a higher rate of gasto-particle conversion of BVOCs. Consequently, the atmospheric loading of organic carbon (OC) increased due to the contribution of SOA to OC aerosol. The increase of atmospheric OC aerosols was prominent in particular in the Indian subcontinent and Indochina Peninsula (IP) during the pre- and early-monsoon periods because the terrestrial biosphere is the major source of BVOC emissions and the atmospheric aerosol concentration diminishes rapidly with the arrival of monsoon rainfall. As the number of atmospheric OC particles increased, the number concentrations of cloud droplets increased, but their size decreased. These changes represent a combination of aerosol-cloud interactions that were favorable to rainfall suppression. However, the modeled precipitation was slightly enhanced in May over the oceans that surround the Indian subcontinent and IP. Further analysis revealed that a compensating updraft in the surrounding oceans was induced by the thermally-driven downdraft in the IP, which was a result of surface cooling associated with direct OC aerosol radiative forcing, and was able to surpass the aerosolcloud interactions. The co-existence of oceanic ascending motion with the maximum convective available potential energy was also found to be crucial for rainfall formation. Although the model produced statistically significant rainfall changes with locally organized patterns, the suggested pathways should be considered guardedly because in the simulation results, 1) the BVOC-induced aerosol direct effect was marginal; 2) cloud-aerosol interactions were modeldependent; and 3) Asian summer monsoons were biased to a nonnegligible extent.

Ambient air pollution has significant impacts on global climate change in complex ways, involving both warming and cooling, and causes an estimated one million deaths every year. Modeling studies and observations from a suite of platforms, including those that are space based, have revealed that air pollution is a widespread global phenomenon. The net effect of air pollution is a global cooling that is masking 50% of the committed greenhouse gas (GHG) warming from the Industrial Revolution. Aggressive air pollution abatement and climate stabilization strategies that reduce cooling pollutants may lead to a short-term warming surge that is unsafe for ecosystems and the human population, imposing complex trade-offs in policy making. Conversely, selective reduction of warming air pollutants to mitigate near-term climate change may offer opportunities for synergistic policy development. Reducing and preventing the accumulation of fossil-fuel carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere is the only sustainable way to protect climate safety in the long term. Here, the current understanding of air pollution effects on global climate change is reviewed, including assessment by individual pollutant, precursor emission, economic sector, and policy-relevant scenarios.