A project from the High Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) has received a €1.5 million ‘Startup Grant’ from the European Research Council (ERC) to research environmental chemistry. forecast weather events. Gabriel Chiodo’s team has been around for five years, CSIC researcher at the Geosciences Institute (IGEO-CSIC-UCM) and ETH Zurich You will examine how changes in the chemical composition of the stratosphere can affect climate forecasts.
“The link between stratospheric composition and atmospheric circulation is not considered in all current forecasting models. and some models that contributed to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report. By improving our understanding of the role of chemical composition, the Soclim project (Stratospheric compositional feedbacks in a changing climate: drivers and mechanisms) helps improve predictions of extreme events,” says Chiodo.
Soclim project It will create an international network that will combine numerical simulations to provide data on stratospheric composition and data from state-of-the-art satellites. have a higher spatial and temporal resolution than previously achieved. “We will extend the European Center’s seasonal forecasting system by combining it with a chemistry model, and in this way, we will measure the impact of including these interactions in seasonal and sub-seasonal forecasting, as well as in climate forecasts from the two global models,” says the researcher.
The project will have a collaborative network of research centers in the United States (National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado), England (University of Cambridge), Germany (Forschungszentrum Juelich) and Switzerland (University of Lausanne, ETH and PMOD). As well as the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.
“We know very well how anthropogenic factors such as chlorofluorocarbons, nitrogen oxides and methane emissions affect the ozone layer and stratospheric water vapor,” Chiodo says, “and we also know that certain meteorological conditions, such as the polar stratosphere, are colder than normal.” This is what happened, for example, when an ozone hole opened in the Arctic in the spring of 2020,” he adds.
In previous studies, Chiodo’s team showed that changes in stratospheric composition in the Arctic can affect atmospheric circulation patterns and cause climate anomalies in Europe and Asia, respectively.
“Ultimately, the main goal of the project is to understand not only how climate influences stratospheric composition, but also how this affects climate, while also examining the physical mechanisms that govern this coupling.” researcher.
The Startup Grant program, which awards this grant, aims to assist in the creation of groups whose principal investigator has between two and seven years of postdoctoral experience and whose research activities are at the limit of knowledge. Scientists can be from any country in the world, provided that they carry out their studies in one of the member states of the European Union or associated countries. In this issue, the ERC has awarded more than 400 grants.
The “Mediterraneanization” of climate change
Prolonged droughts, more intense cold, and sea storms that will increase their severity in attacking the shore According to Jorge Olcina, director of the University of Alicante’s Climatology Laboratory, much of the entire Mediterranean coast forms a phenomenon that scientists already know as the “Mediterraneanization of climate change.”
The climatologist from Alicante insists that to explain this series of phenomena we need to take a look at the increase in the temperature of the Mediterranean Sea, which is an important factor affecting atmospheric circulation in general.
In the 2011-2020 period, the average temperature at the surface was 1.09 degrees Celsius higher than what was present in the 1850-1900 period., an increase in land areas (1,590) more than sea areas (0.880). In addition, the upper layer of the ocean (0 to 700 meters depth) has been warming since the 1970s, suggesting that the main causative factor is human influence.
CO2 emissions are the main cause of ocean acidification. Global mean sea level rose by about 20 cm between 1901 and 2018. Between 1901 and 1971, sea level rose an average of 1.3 mm per year. It increased to 1.9 mm/year between 1971-2006 and to 3.7 mm/year in 2006-2018.
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