Insect Herbivory Caused Plant Stress Emissions Increases the Negative Radiative Forcing of Aerosols

Plant stress in a changing climate is predicted to increase plant volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions and thus can affect the formed secondary organic aerosol (SOA) concentrations, which in turn affect the radiative properties of clouds and aerosol. However, global aerosol-climate models do not usually consider plant stress induced VOCs in their emission schemes. In this study, we modified the monoterpene emission factors in biogenic emission model to simulate biotic stress caused by insect herbivory on needleleaf evergreen boreal and broadleaf deciduous boreal trees and studied the consequent effects on SOA formation, aerosol-cloud interactions as well as direct radiative effects of formed SOA. Simulations were done altering the fraction of stressed and healthy trees in the latest version of ECHAM-HAMMOZ (ECHAM6.3-HAM2.3-MOZ1.0) global aerosol-climate model. Our simulations showed that increasing the extent of stress to the aforementioned tree types, substantially increased the SOA burden especially over the areas where these trees are located. This indicates that increased VOC emissions due to increasing stress enhance the SOA formation via oxidation of VOCs to low VOCs. In addition, cloud droplet number concentration at the cloud top increased with increasing extent of biotic stress. This indicates that as SOA formation increases, it further enhances the number of particles acting as cloud condensation nuclei. The increase in SOA formation also decreased both all-sky and clear-sky radiative forcing. This was due to a shift in particle size distributions that enhanced aerosol reflecting and scattering of incoming solar radiation.

Modelling artificial sea salt emission in large eddy simulations

We study the dispersion of sea salt particles from artificially injected sea spray at a cloud-resolving scale. Understanding of how different aerosol processes affect particle dispersion is crucial when designing emission sources for marine cloud brightening. Compared with previous studies, we include for the first time an explicit treatment of aerosol water, which takes into account condensation, evaporation and their effect on ambient temperature. This enables us to capture the negative buoyancy caused by water evaporation from aerosols. Additionally, we use a higher model resolution to capture aerosol loss through coagulation near the source point. We find that, with a seawater flux of 15 kg s(-1), the cooling due to evaporation can be as much as 1.4 K, causing a delay in particle dispersion of 10-20 min. This delay enhances particle scavenging by a factor of 1.14 compared with simulations without aerosol water. We further show that both cooling and particle dispersion depend on the model resolution, with a maximum particle scavenging efficiency of 20% within 5 h after emission at maximum resolution of 50 m. Based on these results, we suggest further regional high-resolution studies which model several injection periods over several weeks.