Extreme environments such as polar and high altitude regions are more strongly affected by global change than other regions on Earth. At the same time, the change these environments undergo can strongly affect humanity, e.g. depleting water resources with retreating glaciers, or changing weather patterns in North America and Europe with a warming Arctic. Therefore, it is important to develop process-level understanding of such environmental change in order to more accurately develop future scenarios.
Among the many drivers of change are aerosol particles that can reflect radiation directly or indirectly via cloud formation, and hence influence Earth’s energy budget. In this presentation, we will discuss the climate-relevamt role of aerosol particles in extreme environments. The talk will cover field observations of deposited aerosols on glaciers in Central Asia and the implications for accelerated melt. It will also discuss how studying extreme environments that are in part still untouched by human influence – such as the Southern Ocean or the high Arctic – can help to better constrain anthropogenic radiating forcing globally caused by agents other than greenhouse gases. Preliminary results from the recent Arctic Ocean 2018 expedition to the North Pole will be presented to give an outlook of what we expect from the currently ongoing one year-long drift experiment MOSCAiC in the Arctic.
Webcast: http://connect.sunet.se/bgcatm
Lecture Archive: http://vimeo.com/bgcatm/videos
