November 2024:
German Renewables Award 2024: in the category "Lebenswerk des Jahres" goes to Prof. Dr. Mojib Latif
Details of the Branchennetzwerks Erneuerbare Energien Hamburg (EEHH) award ceremony ►
November 2024:
new publication:
Monteiro E A, Silvy Y, Hohn D, Burger F A, Frölicher T L and Mengis N 2024 FROT: A Framework to comprehensively describe radiative contributions to temperature responses Environmental Research Letters 19 124012
Summary:
Different human activities and associated emissions of CO2 and non-CO2 radiative forcing agents and feedbacks determine the final state of Earth’s climate. We introduce FROT (Framework for Radiative cOntributions to Temperature response), a framework which allows for an assessment of components of direct radiative impact to the system (climate forcing), as well as Earth system feedbacks concerning heat and carbon. The framework is versatile in terms of applications and allows for exploring individual components contributions to, for example, temperature stabilisation simulations, or comparisons in different models and scenarios, as it can reasonably explain their simulated temperature variability. Using FROT we show that both net-zero CO2 emissions and small amounts of positive CO2 emissions could lead to a stable global temperature trajectory. Our assessment reveals also which components play a pivotal role in the final level of warming and in enabling a temperature stabilisation. Finally, our framework offers the opportunity to understand interannual to decadal temperature development, taking into consideration previously secondary processes that become increasingly dominant under highly ambitious climate mitigation scenarios, such as Earth system feedbacks.
Introduction and proof of concept to Framework for Radiative contribution Onto Temperature response (FROT): Stacked contributions to atmospheric radiative burden (ARB) from (a, b) CO2 altering contributors and (c, d) all contributors (colored bars – see legend) for the 2°C global temperature stabilisation using UVic ESCM 2.10 between 1950 and 2100. The term all contributors includes those from CO2 panels – note the different vertical scale when comparing (a, b) to (c, d). Annual values are shown on the left panels, while cumulative fluxes are given on the right. Cumulative fluxes are calculated from pre-industrial conditions, i.e. the year 1850. The purple line represents the temperature variability (referring to right y axis), while the black line in (a, b) shows the CO2 radiative forcing (referring to the left y axis) calculated based on Etminan et al., 2016. Similar to the individual forcing contributions, left panels show the temporal derivative of temperature and CO2 radiative forcing, while their simulated/calculated values are shown on the right ones. The black hatched bars indicate the net burden from the sum of the contributors considered.
