DATE/TIME: Friday, April 26, 2024, 2:30 pm
Meiyun Lin
NOAA GFDL
Earth System Feedbacks on Air Quality Extremes in a Changing Climate
With rising temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns, compound drought and heatwaves are increasing in frequency and intensity under climate change. Air quality in a warming climate is vulnerable to large land-biosphere feedbacks, such as reduced pollution removal by drought-stressed vegetation, increasing wildfire and dust emissions, and varying BVOC emissions from plants amidst changing land cover. These interactions are poorly represented in the CMIP6 global chemistry-climate models, limiting our ability to accurately predict future air quality and design effective mitigation strategies. In this talk, Dr. Meiyun Lin will discuss recent and ongoing research at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) to address these challenges. Her work published in Nature Climate Change (2020) highlights an underappreciated ‘climate penalty’ feedback mechanism – namely, substantial reductions of ozone removal by drought-stressed vegetation – as a missing piece to the puzzle of why European ozone pollution episodes have not decreased in recent decades, despite marked reductions in regional emissions of ozone precursors. Her research finds that the consequential events like the 2020 wildfire season over western North America could recur every 5 years in the late 21st century under an intermediate-mitigation climate scenario (Xie and Lin et al., PNAS 2022). Accurately representing oxygenated VOCs and PAN is critical to assess the long-range transport impact of aged wildfire smoke on US urban ozone air quality. Finally, Lin will present the new GFDL variable-resolution global chemistry-climate model designed for research at the nexus of US climate and air quality extremes (Lin et al., JAMES 2024).
Seminar Host:
Xiaomeng Jin
Department of Environmental Sciences, Rutgers University