Non-CO2 Forcers and their Climate, Weather, Air Quality and Health Impacts

Project Information

FOCI

Grant agreement ID: 101056783

DOI

10.3030/101056783

EC signature date 8 May 2022

Start date 1 September 2022

End date 31 August 2026

Funded under

• Climate, Energy and Mobility

Total cost

€ 6 470 976,25

EU contribution

€ 6 470 974,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERZITA KARLOVA
Czechia

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - FOCI (Non-CO2 Forcers and their Climate, Weather, Air Quality and Health Impacts)

Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2024-02-29

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

While overall global warming with the causes and global processes connected to well-mixed greenhouse gases (GHGs), especially CO2, and their impacts on global to continental scales are well understood with a high level of confidence, there are knowledge gaps concerning the impact of many non-CO2 radiative forcers leading to low confidence in the conclusions. This relates mainly to specific anthropogenic and natural precursor emissions of short-lived GHGs and aerosols and their precursors. These gaps and uncertainties also exist in their subsequent effects on atmospheric chemistry and climate, through direct emissions dependent on changes in e.g. agriculture production and technologies based on scenarios for future development as well as feedback of global warming on emissions, e.g. permafrost thaw. In addition to the atmospheric radiative forcing (gaseous or aerosols), albedo changes connected to land use and land-cover can play a role, depending on the adaptation or mitigation measures included in different scenarios.
Thus, the main goal of the EC Horizon Europe project FOCI (accepted within the call HORIZON-CL5-2021-D1-01-0 Improved understanding of greenhouse gas fluxes and radiative forcers, including carbon dioxide removal technologies), is to assess the impact of key radiative forcers, where and how they arise, the processes of their impact on the climate system, to find and test an efficient implementation of these processes into global Earth System Models and into Regional Climate Models, and finally to use the tools developed to investigate mitigation and/or adaptation policies incorporated in selected scenarios of future development targetted at Europe and other regions of the world. We will develop new regionally tuned scenarios based on improved emissions to assess the effects of non-CO2 forcers. Mutual interactions of the results and climate services producers and other end-users will provide feedback for the specific scenarios preparation and potential application to support the decision-making, including climate policy.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

We target significant scientific gaps identified in the IPCC AR6 (2021) and support our conclusions by undertaking comparisons with CMIP6 ensemble of models to evaluate the results. The overall aim of the project is to improve our knowledge of individual and cumulative contribution of non-CO2 radiative forcers and their precursors. Our integrated observational and modelling analysis is focusing on the radiative forcing properties of PM2.5/PM10 CCN and their components (e.g. POA, SOA, BC/EC, SIA, dust), O3 (and its precursors NOx, VOCs, SO2, CO, CH4, and N2O in the wider context of the warming potential of all key GHGs.
The main objective of WP1 during the first 18 months was to build a detailed and comprehensive observationally-based dataset on anthropogenic non-CO2 species including climate-relevant gases and aerosol properties that will be used to constrain numerical sensitivity simulations. This was delivered in D1.1 in terms of the database GHOST. Similarly, the main objective of WP2 was the same, but for natural aerosols. These data are described in D2.1.
In WP3 and WP4, the efforts were aimed to improve and evaluate state-of-the-art global ESMs (WP3) and regional climate and atmospheric composition models (RCMs) (WP4), targeting specific critical processes with the largest uncertainties for improving future next generation climate projections over the spread of scales, planned in WP6. For that, adequate scenarios and emissions are necessary, which was studied in WP5, where significant inconsistency between what is used in standard scenarios for global ESMs, and what is needed for regional couples of RCMs and CTMs, were found and solved. However, significant differences were found in these “standard” emission inventories as some kind of by-product.
In WP7 effort started on localization and optimization of standard emission scenarios, with potential engagement of stakeholders.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Short-lived GHG as well as atmospheric aerosol particles and their climate effects are still underrepresented in climate assessments. This is due to the high spatial and temporal variability of their concentrations and optical properties. Thus, a better characterization and model representation of them is needed to further address policy-related questions related to aerosols and climate, that is what FOCI project has started to do. One of the first achievement beyond the state-of-art is the GHOST database, covering and integrating these substances and their properties. In this respect, some of the aerosol variables/products provided by WP1 have an important contribution to regional/global radiative forcing. In WP2, we have gathered and widened a harmonized data set of long-term observations on aerosol particles (e.g. total particle number concentration, particle number size distribution) and species participating in secondary aerosol formation (e.g. BVOCs). We are in the process of developing a tool that automatically determines aerosols particle growth rate and estimates accuracy (or uncertainties) from these data sets and thus provides the means for evaluating the roles of biogenic and anthropogenic species on the growth rate.

Advancing the representation of atmospheric chemistry and in particular aerosols in Earth system models (WP3) and introducing this into the RCMs (WP4) is important for improving our understanding of climate forcings and feedbacks. A better quantification of historical climate forcing is crucial for reducing the uncertainty in estimates of equilibrium climate sensitivity and transient climate response from the historical temperature record. Improved estimates of climate sensitivity together with an improved representation of future non-CO2 forcings and feedbacks are essential for advancing our knowledge about future climate change. Especially the extent of RCMs with chemistry involved in WP4 aiming at developing a coupled multiscale modelling framework to analyse historical and future climate conditions and their interaction with air quality is cutting edge of contemporary practice.

A core task of the FOCI project is the application of regional climate and urban scale models driven by global earth system models to describe continental to urban scale air quality under present and future climate conditions. The emission data for these scenarios (WP5) need to be consistent with historical climate reconstructions. At the same time, the data need to be suitable for the investigation of climate impacts as well as air quality effects. It became necessary to investigate various emission inventories and to fill in gaps. This has led to important finding that there are significant differences between available emission databases, moreover, with the inconsistencies between them in terms of available characteristics. This is unexpected, but important output.

FOCI project scheme

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