Identification

Title

Climate impacts of COVID‐19 induced emission changes

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic led to dramatic changes in economic activity in 2020. We use estimates of emission changes for 2020 in two Earth System Models (ESMs) to simulate the impacts of the COVID-19 economic changes. Ensembles of nudged simulations are used to separate small signals from meteorological variability. Reductions in aerosol and precursor emissions, chiefly black carbon and sulfate (SO4), led to reductions in total anthropogenic aerosol cooling through aerosol-cloud interactions. The average overall Effective Radiative Forcing (ERF) peaks at +0.29 +/- 0.15 Wm(-2) in spring 2020. Changes in cloud properties are smaller than observed changes during 2020. Impacts of these changes on regional land surface temperature range up to +0.3 K. The peak impact of these aerosol changes on global surface temperature is very small (+0.03 K). However, the aerosol changes are the largest contribution to radiative forcing and temperature changes as a result of COVID-19 affected emissions, larger than ozone, CO2 and contrail effects.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d71c217j

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2021-02-16T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact