Climate Response to Short-lived Pollutants (CReSP)

This project quantifies the climate response to Short-Lived Climate Pollutants (SLCPs) such as methane, ozone, soot and sulphate; which affect the climate but whose future concentrations are also determined by air quality policy. Significant changes in emissions of these pollutants are expected over the next few decades due to air quality improvement measures, therefore it is crucial to understand what these measures will do to climate, particularly in the near term. The overall goal of the project will be to advance the science by quantifying the meteorological changes in moisture and cloudiness ("rapid adjustments") from a range of pollutants emitted from different locations, and hence determine their overall climate effects on temperature and precipitation..

The student will run atmosphere-only simulations with UKESM1 changing the emissions of SLCPs one at a time in 3 regions. They will use innovative modelling techniques to restrict the rapid adjustments in the climate model, e.g. by restricting ("nudging") the changes in winds, and nudging the temperature response separately in the troposphere and stratosphere. They will develop analysis methods on the model output to diagnose the Earth's radiative balance and the consequent rapid adjustments in meteorological variables. The student will run the SOCRATES model to calculate the radiative imbalances separately from the climate model in order to individually quantify the impacts of each of the meteorological changes and compare these with the total effect from the climate model. They will apply the findings to an air quality improvement scenario to assess the full impact of SLCPs