Total volcanic stratospheric aerosol optical depths and implications for global climate change
By D. Ridley, S. Solomon, J. Barnes, V. Burlakov, T. Deshler, S. I. Dolgii, A. Herber, T. Nagai, Ryan Reynolds Neely, A. V. Nevzorov and 7 more. 2014
192 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Understanding the cooling effect of recent volcanoes is of particular interest in the context of the post‐2000 slowing of the rate of global warming. Satellite observations of aerosol optical depth above 15 km have demonstrated that small‐magnitude volcanic eruptions substantially perturb incoming solar radiation. Here we use lidar, Aerosol Robotic Network, and balloon‐borne observations to provide evidence that currently available satellite databases neglect substantial amounts of volcanic aerosol between the tropopause and 15 km at middle to high latitudes and therefore underestimate total radiative forcing resulting from the recent eruptions. Incorporating these estimates into a simple climate model, we determine the global volcanic aerosol forcing since 2000 to be −0.19 ± 0.09 Wm−2. This translates into an estimated global cooling of 0.05 to 0.12°C. We conclude that recent volcanic events are responsible for more post‐2000 cooling than is implied by satellite databases that neglect volcanic aerosol effects below 15 km.
Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c2308f7f2d9d44cc52df8401ee3ad40516750b4a
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Citations in the corpus
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- Robust comparison of climate models with observations using blended land air and ocean sea surface temperatures (2015, background): “Several contributory factors to the divergence have been identified, including an increase in moderate volcanic eruptions [Solomon et al., 2011; Ridley et al., 2014; Santer et al., 2014a, 2014b], a reduction in solar activity, a decrease in stratospheric water vapor concentration [Solomon et al.,…”
- Global volcanic aerosol properties derived from emissions, 1990–2014, using CESM1(WACCM) (2016, background): “The available lidar measurements above 10 km at Ny-Ålesund (78.9°N, 11.9°W) from January to September 2008 and February to September 2009 [Ridley et al., 2014;Hoffmann, 2011] show excellent agreement MILLS ET AL.”