Tropospheric aerosols are tiny particles suspended in the Earth's atmosphere. They include things like dust, pollution, smoke, and even natural substances like sea salt and pollen. These aerosols can come from both natural and human activities and have various effects on the climate and weather, such as reflecting or absorbing sunlight, influencing cloud formation, and affecting air quality.
Full definition
Mishchenko, M.I., B. Cairns, J. Chowdhary, I.V. Geogdzhayev, L. Liu, and L.D. Travis, 2005: Remote sensing of terrestrial
tropospheric aerosols from aircraft and satellites.
It would seem that before pollution laws really take effect, assuming constant economic growth, both the rate CO2 output and cumulative CO2 grow exponentially — but so do is the rate of reflective
tropospheric aerosol emission — and the effects roughly cancel one - another.
Hence, the mechanism appears to show why both twenty - first century and time - invariant CO2 forcing lead to similar values of φ in climate models despite the presence of transient ocean heat uptake, whereas twentieth century forcing — which has a significant spatially confined anthropogenic
tropospheric aerosol component that breaches the first condition — leads to modelled values of φ that vary widely amongst models and in time.
This early success led to the ambitious Global Atmospheric Measurements Experiment
on Tropospheric Aerosols and Gases (GAMETAG) project in 1977 — 1978.
This diagram shows types, and size distribution in micrometres, of atmospheric particulate matter This animation shows aerosol optical thickness of emitted and transported
key tropospheric aerosols from 17 August 2006 to 10 April 2007, from a 10 km resolution GEOS - 5 «nature run» using the GOCART model.
Tropospheric aerosols play a crucial role in climate and can cause a climate forcing directly by absorbing and reflecting sunlight, thereby cooling or heating the atmosphere, and indirectly by modifying cloud properties.
Mishchenko, M.I., L.D. Travis, R.A. Kahn, and R.A. West, 1997: Modeling phase functions for
dustlike tropospheric aerosols using a mixture of randomly oriented polydisperse spheroids.
We argue that this is the long - term anthropogenic trend, forced by greenhouse gas increases offset
by tropospheric aerosol cooling, which also increased along with industrialization.
Liepert, B., and I. Tegen, 2002: Multidecadal solar radiation trends in the United States and Germany and direct
tropospheric aerosol forcing.
NA # 19: You are right,
tropospheric aerosols from fossil fuels are incredibly bad for human health and other environmental impacts (black carbon soot, acid rain, radioactive emissions, mercury poisoning).
They include changes in solar irradiance, greenhouse gases,
tropospheric aerosols, and volcanic aerosols.
If you look at
the tropospheric aerosol effect, you have to add the light blue and the purple dotted curve, yielding -1.8 W / m ^ 2.
As coal plants get cleaned up in the future some of the cooling aspect of
the tropospheric aerosols will be lost.
Despite potentially large absolute errors in these forcings, their impact on our analysis is likely to be small, as
the tropospheric aerosol forcing in the datasets analyzed changed very little over 1985 — 96 (Myhre et al. 2001).»
If you add all the GHGs,
tropospheric aerosols and surface albedo (TA+SA) for each year you will get a time series of man - made forcings from 1850 to 2015.
The inset in Figure 2d shows the individual greenhouse gases,
tropospheric aerosols and the land surface plus snow albedo components that combine to give the net anthropogenic forcing.
Figure 2 shows the correlation between total anthropogenic forcing and forcing due to
tropospheric aerosols.