To assess long-range risks to food, water, energy and other critical natural resources, decision-makers often rely on Earth-system models capable of producing reliable projections of regional and global environmental changes spanning decades.
To assess long-range risks to food, water, energy and other critical natural resources, decision-makers often rely on Earth-system models capable of producing reliable projections of regional and global environmental changes spanning decades.
A key component of such models is the representation of atmospheric chemistry. Atmospheric simulations utilizing state-of-the-art complex chemical mechanisms promise the most accurate simulations of atmospheric chemistry. Unfortunately their size, complexity, and computational requirements have tended to limit such simulations to short time periods and a small number of scenarios to account for uncertainty.
Now a team of researchers led by the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change has devised a strategy to incorporate simplified chemical mechanisms in atmospheric simulations that can match the results produced by more complex mechanisms for most regions and time periods. If implemented in a three-dimensional Earth-system model, the new modeling strategy could enable scientists and decision-makers to perform low-cost, rapid atmospheric chemistry simulations that cover long time periods under a wide range of scenarios. This new capability could both improve scientists’ understanding of atmospheric chemistry and provide decision-makers with a powerful risk assessment tool.
Read more at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Image: This graphic shows NASA studies of high springtime ozone levels over Canada and the Arctic. CREDIT: Kurt Severance / NASA Langley Research Center
