Whether intentionally set to consume agricultural waste or naturally ignited in forests or peatlands, open-burning fires impact the global climate system in two ways which, to some extent, cancel each other out. On one hand, they generate a significant fraction of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, which drive up the average global surface temperature. On the other hand, they produce atmospheric aerosols, organic carbon, black carbon, and sulfate-bearing particulates that can lower that temperature either directly, by reflecting sunlight skyward, or indirectly, by increasing the reflectivity of clouds. Because wildfire aerosols play a key role in determining the future of the planet’s temperature and precipitation patterns, it’s crucial that today’s climate models — upon which energy and climate policymaking depend — accurately represent their impact on the climate system.
Whether intentionally set to consume agricultural waste or naturally ignited in forests or peatlands, open-burning fires impact the global climate system in two ways which, to some extent, cancel each other out. On one hand, they generate a significant fraction of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, which drive up the average global surface temperature. On the other hand, they produce atmospheric aerosols, organic carbon, black carbon, and sulfate-bearing particulates that can lower that temperature either directly, by reflecting sunlight skyward, or indirectly, by increasing the reflectivity of clouds. Because wildfire aerosols play a key role in determining the future of the planet’s temperature and precipitation patterns, it’s crucial that today’s climate models — upon which energy and climate policymaking depend — accurately represent their impact on the climate system.
But a new study in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics by researchers at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change shows that at least one widely-used climate model is overestimating the cooling effect of these aerosol emissions by as much as 23 percent.
“This overestimation could lead to errors in projections of surface temperature and rainfall, both globally and regionally,“ says Chien Wang, a senior research scientist at MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and the Joint Program, who co-authored the paper with two members of his group: lead author and research scientist Benjamin S. Grandey and postdoc Hsiang-He Lee of the Center for Environmental Sensing and Modeling at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology. “We hope our findings will reduce such errors in climate modeling.”
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Image: A destructive wildfire burned through Canada’s Northern Alberta region, razing neighborhoods in Fort McMurray and displacing tens of thousands of residents.
Image courtesy: NASA Earth Observatory
