Climate impacts of short-lived pollutants and methane in the Arctic – CLIMSLIP

-Modelling and aircraft campaign in Siberia including new airborne aerosol lidar measurements to quantify boreal fire and methane sources.
-Aerosol cloud interaction analysis combining 7 years of space-borne and aircraft observations of aerosol and cloud optical properties and new ground-based observations in Spitzbergen, including the quantification of the radiative effects of aerosol plumes.
-Atmospheric soot and snowpack measurements combined with development of modules to assess the impact of soot deposition on melting and albedo.
-Sources, transport and transformation of ozone and aerosols in pollutant plumes transported to the Arctic using aircraft/satellite data.
-Global and regional modelling of aerosol and trace gas distributions.

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Climate impacts of short-lived pollutants in the polar region (CLIMSLIP-France) is the French contribution to the European Science Foundation (ESF) CLIMSLIP project. The goal is to improve our understanding about the impact of short-lived pollutants (SLPs), ozone and aerosols, as well as methane on Arctic climate change. Association with European CLIMSLIP provides an exciting opportunity to collaborate with European groups working on this issue. Short-lived pollutants, especially, black carbon and ozone are currently receiving much attention since they may be making a significant contribution to climate change in the Arctic. Enhanced warming is also thought to be due to declines in sulphur emissions, which were offsetting global warming (due to cooling effects of sulphate aerosols). Due to their short lifetime, relative to CO2, mitigation of short-lived pollutants could offer an attractive and more rapid solution to warming in the Arctic where significant increases in surface temperatures and decreases in summer sea-ice have already been observed.
The CLIMSLIP vision is to understand the radiative forcing in the Arctic caused by SLPs and methane accurately enough to reliably guide climate policy. However, such decisions need to be based on sound scientific basis. CLIMSLIP aims to reduce uncertainties in estimates of radiative forcing related to ozone, methane and aerosols (especially black carbon) including the impact of soot deposition on snow/ice through improved understanding of the underlying processes. Results will feed directly into IPCC and other assessments related to global change policy. The proposal will also make a significant contribution to the goals of the recently formed Observatoire Scientifique de l’Arctique; an initiative coordinated by CNRS/INSU. It will also contribute to the new CNRS YAK-AEROSIB Laboratoire Internationl Assoié (LIA). This proposal, which builds on, and extends POLARCAT-France, aims to make use of the wealth of data collected during IPY on Arctic atmospheric composition. CLIMSLIP is a 3-year project (2012 to 2014) divided into 7 tasks. Five partners are involved in this proposal but, in addition to LaMP and LGGE, three groups (LATMOS, LMD, LSCE) have integrated activities as part of IPSL on data analysis and modelling. In particular, we propose to use a hierarchy of modelling approaches to better quantify and improve model treatments of aerosol impacts on the Arctic radiative budget, aerosol-cloud interactions, soot deposition on snow, treatments of boreal fires and the tropospheric ozone budget. Thus, we request costs for postdocs to perform detailed data analyses and modelling using a variety of models ranging from Lagrangian for plume processing, cloud and snowpack modelling, regional models to study aerosol properties/radiative forcing, improved treatments of soot deposition on snow, global/regional modelling of methane (inverse modelling of sources), atmospheric composition (ozone/aerosols) and treatment of fire emissions. We also propose to add value and to take advantage of existing and planned new measurement activities in order to collect new original data which will be used to reduce uncertainties about processes influencing Arctic climate change. We propose to make novel measurements of soot in air/snow and on aerosol-cloud interactions (new data on cloud/aerosol microphysical and optical properties) in collaboration with ESF project groups at Ny Alesund. We also propose a new campaign with the YAK aircraft in Siberia to obtain additional methane data on boreal sources and to make new measurements of vertical aerosol distributions by installing an aerosol micro-lidar on the aircraft. This will provide some of the first in-situ measurements about the vertical distribution of boreal fire plumes. Thus, we request funds for one campaign with the Russian-French YAK aircraft and a spring field campaign Ny Alesund, northern Norway.