Aerosol effect on climate extremes in Europe under different future scenarios

Abstract

This study investigates changes in extreme temperature and precipitation events under different future scenarios of anthropogenic aerosol emissions (i.e., SO2 and black and organic carbon) simulated with an aerosol-climate model (ECHAM5-HAM) with focus on Europe. The simulations include a maximum feasible aerosol reduction (MFR) sce- nario and a current legislation emission (CLEmod) scenario where Europe implements the MFR scenario, but the rest of the world follows the current legislation scenario and a greenhouse gas scenario. The strongest changes rela- tive to the year 2000 are projected for the MFR scenario, in which the global aerosol reduction greatly enforces the general warming effect due to greenhouse gases and results in significant increases of temperature and pre- cipitation extremes in Europe. Regional warming effects can also be identified from aerosol reductions under the CLEmod scenario. This becomes most obvious in the increase of the hottest summer daytime temperatures in Northern Europe.