Improved estimates of preindustrial biomass burning reduce the magnitude of aerosol climate forcing in the Southern Hemisphere.
Liu, P.; Kaplan, J.O.; Mickley, L.J.; Li, Y.; Chellman, N.J.; Arienzo, M.M.; Kodros, J.K.; Pierce, J.R.; Sigl, M.; Frietag, J.; Mulvaney, R. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5372-8148; Curran, M.A.J.; McConnell, J.R.. 2021 Improved estimates of preindustrial biomass burning reduce the magnitude of aerosol climate forcing in the Southern Hemisphere. Science Advances, 7 (22), eabc1379. 11, pp. 10.1126/sciadv.abc1379
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Copyright © 2021 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, so long as the resultant use is not for commercial advantage and provided the original work is properly cited. eabc1379.full.pdf - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial 4.0. Download (1MB) | Preview |
Abstract/Summary
Fire plays a pivotal role in shaping terrestrial ecosystems and the chemical composition of the atmosphere and thus influences Earth’s climate. The trend and magnitude of fire activity over the past few centuries are controversial, which hinders understanding of preindustrial to present-day aerosol radiative forcing. Here, we present evidence from records of 14 Antarctic ice cores and 1 central Andean ice core, suggesting that historical fire activity in the Southern Hemisphere (SH) exceeded present-day levels. To understand this observation, we use a global fire model to show that overall SH fire emissions could have declined by 30% over the 20th century, possibly because of the rapid expansion of land use for agriculture and animal production in middle to high latitudes. Radiative forcing calculations suggest that the decreasing trend in SH fire emissions over the past century largely compensates for the cooling effect of increasing aerosols from fossil fuel and biofuel sources.
Item Type: | Publication - Article |
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Digital Object Identifier (DOI): | 10.1126/sciadv.abc1379 |
ISSN: | 2375-2548 |
Date made live: | 01 Jun 2021 09:54 +0 (UTC) |
URI: | https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/530435 |
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