Global cooling

Summary

Global cooling was a conjecture, especially during the 1970s, of imminent cooling of the Earth culminating in a period of extensive glaciation, due to the cooling effects of aerosols or orbital forcing. Some press reports in the 1970s speculated about continued cooling; these did not accurately reflect the scientific literature of the time, which was generally more concerned with warming from an enhanced greenhouse effect. In the mid 1970s, the limited temperature series available suggested that the temperature had decreased for several decades up to then. As longer time series of higher quality became available, it became clear that global temperature showed significant increases overall. Introduction: general awareness and concern By the 1970s, scientists were becoming increasingly aware that estimates of global temperatures showed cooling since 1945, as well as the possibility of large scale w

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling

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Spatio-Temporal Relationship between Land Cover and Land Surface Temperature in Urban Areas: A Case Study in Geneva and Paris

Roberto Castello, Xu Ge, Dasaraden Mauree, Jean-Louis Scartezzini

Currently, more than half of the world’s population lives in cities, which leads to major changes in land use and land surface temperature (LST). The associated urban heat island (UHI) effects have multiple impacts on energy consumption and human health. A better understanding of how different land covers affect LST is necessary for mitigating adverse impacts, and supporting urban planning and public health management. This study explores a distance-based, a grid-based and a point-based analysis to investigate the influence of impervious surfaces, green area and waterbodies on LST, from large (distance and grid based analysis with 400 m grids) to smaller (point based analysis with 30 m grids) scale in the two mid-latitude cities of Paris and Geneva. The results at large scale confirm that the highest LST was observed in the city centers. A significantly positive correlation was observed between LST and impervious surface density. An anticorrelation between LST and green area density was observed in Paris. The spatial lag model was used to explore the spatial correlation among LST, NDBI, NDVI and MNDWI on a smaller scale. Inverse correlations between LST and NDVI and MNDWI, respectively, were observed. We conclude that waterbodies display the greatest mitigation on LST and UHI effects both on the large and smaller scale. Green areas play an important role in cooling effects on the smaller scale. An increase of evenly distributed green area and waterbodies in urban areas is suggested to lower LST and mitigate UHI effects.

2020

Increasing urban tree cover is an often proposed mitigation strategy against urban heat as trees are expected to cool cities through evapotranspiration and shade provision. However, trees also modify wind flow and urban aerodynamic roughness, which can potentially limit heat dissipation. Existing studies show a varying cooling potential of urban trees in different climates and times of the day. These differences are so far not systematically explained as partitioning the individual tree effects is challenging and impossible through observations alone. Here, we conduct numerical experiments removing and adding radiation, evapotranspiration, and aerodynamic roughness effects caused by urban trees using a mechanistic urban ecohydrological model. Simulations are presented for four cities in different climates (Phoenix, Singapore, Melbourne, Zurich) considering the seasonal and diurnal cycles of air and surface temperatures. Results show that evapotranspiration of well-watered trees alone can decrease local 2 m air temperature at maximum by 3.1– 5.8 °C in the four climates during summer. Further cooling is prevented by stomatal closure at peak temperatures as high vapour pressure deficits limit transpiration. While shading reduces surface temperatures, the interaction of a non-transpiring tree with radiation can increase 2 m air temperature by up to 1.6 – 2.1 °C in certain hours of the day at local scale, thus partially counteracting the evapotranspirative cooling effect. Furthermore, in the analysed scenarios, which do not account for tree wind blockage effects, trees lead to a decrease in urban roughness, which inhibits turbulent energy exchange and increases air temperature during daytime. At night, single tree effects are variable likely due to differences in atmospheric stability within the urban canyon. These results explain reported diurnal, seasonal and climatic differences in the cooling effects of urban trees, and can guide future field campaigns, planning strategies, and species selection aimed at improving local microclimate using urban greenery.

2021

Development of the Jungfraujoch multiwavelength lidar system for continuous observations of the aerosol optical properties in the free troposphere

Gilles Larchevêque

Climate changes and global warming are generally associated with the enhanced greenhouse effect, but aerosols can induce a cooling effect and thus regionally mask this warming effect. Unfortunately, the strong variability both in space and in time of the aerosols and thus the difficulty to characterize their global basic properties induce large uncertainties in the predictions of the numerical models. Those uncertainties are as high as the absolute level of the enhanced greenhouse forcing. To solve this problem it is necessary to improve the set of well-calibrated instruments (both in situ and remote sensing) with the ability to measure the changes in stratospheric and tropospheric aerosols amounts and their radiative properties, changes in atmospheric water vapor and temperature distributions, and changes in clouds cover and cloud radiative properties. The quantity used to assess the importance of one compound (greenhouse gases, aerosols) to the variation of the radiative budget of the Earth is the radiative forcing. One of those forcings is the direct aerosol radiative forcing and it depends on the optical depths and the upscatter fraction of the aerosols. Those two parameters depend on the chemical composition and size distribution of the aerosols. Thus the key parameters of this radiative forcing are the chemical composition through its refractive index and the size distribution of the aerosols. This thesis deals with the design and the implementation of one multi-wavelength lidar system at the Jungfraujoch Alpine Research Station (Alt. 3580m asl). This lidar system is a combination of one standard backscatter lidar and one Raman lidar. Its design have been supported by a ray tracing analysis of the receiver part. The laser transmitter is based on a tripled Nd:YAG laser and the backscattered light is collected by one Newtonian telescope for the tropospheric measurements and by one Cassegrain telescope for the future stratospheric measurements. The received wavelengths for each telescope include three elastically scattered wavelengths (355, 532 and 1064nm), two spontaneous Raman signals from nitrogen (387 and 607nm) and one spontaneous Raman signal from the water vapor (408nm). The optical signals received by each of the telescopes are separated spectrally by two filter polychromators. They are build up around a set of beamsplitters and custom design thin band pass filters with high out-of-band rejection. On the visible channel, the adds of a Wollaston prism separates the parallel polarized backscattered signal (532(p)nm) of the perpendicular polarized one (532(c)nm). Photomultiplier tubes perform the detection of the signals for the UV and visible wavelengths and by Si-avalanche photodiodes for the near-infrared signal. The acquisition of the signals is performed by seven transient recorders in analog and in photon counting modes. Within the frame of the EARLINET (European Aerosol Research Lidar Network), hardware and software intercomparisons have been done. The software intercomparison has been divided into the validation of the elastic algorithm and the Raman algorithm. Those intercomparisons of the inversions of the lidar signals have been performed using synthetic data for a number of situations of different complexity. The hardware intercomparison have been achieved with the mobile micro-lidar of the Observatoire Cantonal de Neuchâtel. The present lidar system provides independent aerosol extinction and backscatter profiles, depolarization ratio and water vapor mixing ratio up to the tropopause. Their uncertainties could be smaller than 20% and thus make possible the retrieval of the microphysical aerosol parameters like the volume concentration distribution and the mean and integral parameters of the particle size distribution, (effective radius, total surface-area concentration, total volume concentration and number concentration of particles). This retrieval is performed by one algorithm of the Institute of Mathematic of the University of Postdam based on the hybrid regularization method. The first results of the retrieval of the volume concentration distribution with three backscatter (355, 532 and 1064nm) and one extinction (355nm) profiles has demonstrated promising results. Future upgrades of the system will add ozone concentration and temperature profile up to the stratopause.

EPFL2002

Development of the Jungfraujoch multiwavelength lidar system for continuous observations of the aerosol optical properties in the free troposphere

Gilles Larchevêque

EPFL2002

2021