Identification

Title

Large impacts, past and future, of ozone-depleting substances on Brewer-Dobson circulation trends: A multi-model assessment

Abstract

Substantial increases in the atmospheric concentration of well-mixed greenhouse gases (notably CO2 ), such as those projected to occur by the end of the 21st century under large radiative forcing scenarios, have long been known to cause an acceleration of the Brewer-Dobson circulation (BDC) in climate models. More recently, however, several single-model studies have proposed that ozone-depleting substances might also be important drivers of BDC trends. As these studies were conducted with different forcings over different periods, it is difficult to combine them to obtain a robust quantitative picture of the relative importance of ozone-depleting substances as drivers of BDC trends. To this end, we here analyze—over identical past and future periods—the output from 20 similarly forced models, gathered from two recent chemistry-climate modeling intercomparison projects. Our multimodel analysis reveals that ozone-depleting substances are responsible for more than half of the modeled BDC trends in the two decades 1980–2000. We also find that, as a consequence of the Montreal Protocol, decreasing concentrations of ozone-depleting substances in coming decades will strongly decelerate the BDC until the year 2080, reducing the age-of-air trends by more than half, and will thus substantially mitigate the impact of increasing CO2 . As ozone-depleting substances impact BDC trends, primarily, via the depletion/recovery of stratospheric ozone over the South Pole, they impart seasonal and hemispheric asymmetries to the trends which may offer opportunities for detection in coming decades.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d7tm7cpz

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

2019-05-30T00:00:00Z

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