Presenter: Hailong Wang

Title: Climate responses to emissions reductions due to COVID-19

Abstract:

The worldwide dramatic responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, following China’s nationwide lockdown in late January 2020, have led to a large reduction in human activities and thus emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and aerosols. This has also triggered research interest in the environmental and climate sciences community in understanding the impacts of these reductions. Observation-based and modeling studies have shown discernible impacts of COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions on regional air quality and climate. By prescribing aerosol emission changes during the lockdown, back‐to‐work and post‐lockdown stages of COVID‐19 in a global climate model, Yang et al. (2020) show a surface warming effect over several continental regions of the Northern Hemisphere via aerosol-radiation and aerosol-cloud interactions. A dozen earth system models, including E3SM, participated in a coordinated model intercomparison (CovidMIP) to examine climate responses to short-term emissions reductions due to COVID-19 (Jones et al., 2021). Using E3SMv1, we performed 10 initial-condition ensemble simulations that impose a “two-year blip” forcing (i.e., two-year reductions in GHGs and aerosol emissions, starting in 2020 and reverting to the baseline SSP2-45 levels by the end of 2022). The 12 models agree on the reduced aerosol loading and associated increases in shortwave radiation at the surface. The global mean impact on surface air temperature and rainfall during 2020-2024 is small, but there are interesting regional signals of changes in temperature and precipitation. The CovidMIP initial analysis and some highlights of E3SMv1 results will be discussed in this presentation.

Date

13 May 2021

Time

PT: 8:30 am
ET: 11:30 am

Call Info

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Attendees

Presentation

Time	Title	Presenter	Presentation	Recording	Notes
30 min	Climate responses to emissions reductions due to COVID-19	Hailong Wang	Wang_E3SM_webinar_CovidMIP.pdf	MP4 Movie (on the E3SM YouTube Channel)

Time

Title

Presenter

Presentation

Recording

Notes

30 min

Climate responses to emissions reductions due to COVID-19

Hailong Wang

Wang_E3SM_webinar_CovidMIP.pdf

MP4 Movie (on the E3SM YouTube Channel)

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