Publication Date:
2023-07-14
Description:
As the climate continues to warm, a range of feedbacks are expected by the response of vegetation. One of these is the BVOC-aerosol-cloud feedback, initiated by vegetation emitting more biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) with higher temperature. Once in the atmosphere, these BVOCs are oxidised and can then produce large amounts of biogenic secondary organic aerosols (BSOA) which again cool the surface both directly and through cloud-aerosol interactions (BSOA-aerosol feedback). The strength of this feedback, however, is poorly constrained, with some models suggest it holds significant importance, whereas others suggesting it to be completely negligible. Here, we use two unique long term observational datasets representing the boreal and tropical forests respectively, together with satellite data, to evaluate the BVOC-aerosol-cloud feedback in four ESMs through its chain of processes, using natural variability as a proxy for perturbed states of the climate in both models and observations. We show that the highest modelled feedback in the boreal zone is very likely an overestimate, but also that all the models seem to underestimate the feedback in the tropics. Taking full advantage of the growing number of long-term observational datasets for process evaluation in ESMs shows great promise for pin-pointing areas for model improvement, understanding and constraining variability modelled feedbacks and forcing.
Language:
English
Type:
info:eu-repo/semantics/conferenceObject
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