Matfyz scientists assess the impact of atmospheric chemistry on climate

While overall the global warming with the causes and global processes connected to CO₂, and its impacts on global to continental scales are well understood with a high level of confidence, there are knowledge gaps concerning the impact of many other non-CO₂ radiative forcers leading to low confidence in the conclusions. This relates mainly to specific anthropogenic and natural precursor emissions of short-lived greenhouse gases and aerosols with their precursors.

These gaps and uncertainties also exist in their subsequent effects on atmospheric chemistry and climate, through direct emissions dependent on changes in e.g., agriculture production and technologies based on scenarios for future development as well as feedbacks of global warming on emissions, e.g., permafrost thaw, biogenic emissions etc. In addition to the atmospheric radiative forcing (gaseous or aerosols), albedo changes connected to land-use and land-cover can play a role, depending on the adaptation or mitigation measures included in different scenarios.

The main goal of the new EC Horizon Europe project FOCI (which officially started on September, 1, 2022 and will last 4 years) is to assess the impact of key radiative forcers other than CO₂, where and how they arise, the processes of their impact on the climate system, to find and test an efficient implementation of these processes into global Earth System Models and into Regional Climate Models coupled with Chemistry Transport Models.

„This is what we are doing at our Department of Atmospheric Physics and contributing among others to the project. Inclusion of atmospheric chemistry to regional climate models becomes to be essential especially for the in-land simulations on the way to achieve Regional Earth System Models,“ says Tomáš Halenka, coordinator of the project.

Finally, the aim is to use the tools developed to investigate mitigation and/or adaptation policies incorporated in selected scenarios of future development targeted at Europe and other regions of the world. We will study new regionally optimized scenarios based on improved emissions to assess the effects of non-CO₂ forcers. Mutual interactions of the results and climate services producers and other end-users will provide feedbacks for the specific scenarios preparation and potential application to support the decision making, including climate policy.

The project will last 4 years in cooperation of 17 partners from 7 countries. The kick-off meeting will be held at Charles University that coordinates the project, in Prague on September, 19–21, 2022. The results will be released on the webpage of Department of Atmospheric Physics.

KFA