Environmental Meteorology seminar #2

[Adrian Tompkins]

/Lecture 2 in the ICTP-Trento Environmental Meteorology seminar series, 
Thursday 4th March at 3pm CET, hosted by University of Trento
/

/Pre-registration required:
/

//
Improving our mechanistic understanding of the regional climate response 
to anthropogenic aerosols
[Scientific Calendar <http://indico.ictp.it/event/9568/>]

Massimo Bollasina

Massimo Bollasina
/School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh.
Edinburgh, UK/

*Abstract*

By inducing anomalous heating gradients in the atmosphere and at the 
surface via radiation changes and diabatic heating anomalies, especially 
in the tropics, aerosols can affect the large-scale atmospheric 
circulation and, as a result, induce teleconnections which extend the 
climate impact of aerosols far from their source regions to produce 
anomalies at hemispheric, if not near-global, scales. One of the key 
uncertainties hindering our ability to project future climate change 
more robustly, especially at regional scale, is our limited confidence 
in understanding and quantifying the atmospheric dynamical response to 
climate forcing. The latter, in the case of aerosols, is also poorly 
characterised due to compounding uncertainties in the aerosol processes 
themselves. This talk will discuss various aspects of the atmospheric 
circulation response to regional and global aerosol forcing and 
associated climate impact by using multiple sets of experiments with 
state-of-the-art climate models with perturbed aerosol emissions. 
Particular focus is given to tropical-extratropical interactions and the 
monsoon system, and the underlying physical pathways generating regional 
and remote climate anomalies are discussed.