A project from the High Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) has secured a €1.5 million Startup Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) to advance research in environmental chemistry and forecast weather events. Gabriel Chiodo leads a team that has been active for five years, affiliated with the Geosciences Institute (IGEO-CSIC-UCM) and ETH Zurich. The research examines how shifts in the stratosphere’s chemical makeup can influence climate forecasts.
“The link between stratospheric composition and atmospheric circulation is not fully integrated into many current forecast models, and it was only partially considered in models contributing to the IPCC reports. By deepening our understanding of chemical composition, the Soclim project (Stratospheric compositional feedbacks in a changing climate: drivers and mechanisms) aims to refine predictions of extreme events”, notes Chiodo.
Soclim will establish an international network that blends numerical simulations with data from state-of-the-art satellites to track stratospheric composition at higher spatial and temporal resolutions than ever before. “We will extend the European Center’s seasonal forecasting system by integrating a chemistry model, enabling us to quantify the impact of these interactions on seasonal and sub-seasonal forecasts, as well as on climate projections from global models”, says the researcher.
The project will involve a collaborative network of research centers in the United States (National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado), the United Kingdom (University of Cambridge), Germany (Forschungszentrum Juelich), and Switzerland (University of Lausanne, ETH, and PMOD), alongside the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.
“We know very well how human activities such as chlorofluorocarbons, nitrogen oxides, and methane emissions affect the ozone layer and stratospheric water vapor”, Chiodo explains. “We also know that certain meteorological conditions, such as a particularly cold polar stratosphere, can amplify these effects. This is precisely what was observed when an ozone hole opened over the Arctic in spring 2020”, he adds.
Past studies by Chiodo’s team demonstrated that changes in stratospheric composition in the Arctic can influence atmospheric circulation patterns, potentially triggering climate anomalies in Europe and Asia alike.
“Ultimately, the main aim of the project is to understand how climate influences stratospheric composition and, in turn, how this coupling feeds back into climate, while also unpacking the physical mechanisms that govern these interactions”, the researcher articulates.
The ERC Startup Grant program supports groups led by principal investigators with two to seven years of postdoctoral experience whose work sits at the frontier of knowledge. Researchers from any country may apply, provided their studies take place in an EU member state or associated country. In this round, the ERC awarded more than 400 grants.
The Mediterraneanization of Climate Change
Prolonged droughts, intensified cold spells, and storms along the coast are expected to intensify as climate patterns shift. Jorge Olcina, director of the University of Alicante’s Climatology Laboratory, describes this broad phenomenon as the Mediterraneanization of climate change, a label that captures the region’s evolving risk profile.
The Alicante climatologist emphasizes that to understand this sequence of phenomena, one must consider the warming of the Mediterranean Sea, a crucial factor affecting overall atmospheric circulation.
From 2011 to 2020, the average surface temperature was about 1.09 degrees Celsius higher than the 1850–1900 baseline. Land areas grew more than the sea, a trend echoed by ocean data. The upper ocean layer, up to about 700 meters deep, has continued warming since the 1970s, pointing to human activity as a primary driver.
CO2 emissions remain the central cause of ocean acidification. Global mean sea level rose roughly 20 cm between 1901 and 2018. The rate of sea-level rise accelerated from about 1.3 mm per year (1901–1971) to 1.9 mm/year (1971–2006) and then to about 3.7 mm/year in 2006–2018.
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