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    Geoengineering climate by stratospheric sulfur injections: Earth system vulnerability to technological failure
    (Dordrecht [u.a.] : Springer, 2009) Brovkin, V.; Petoukhov, V.; Claussen, M.; Bauer, E.; Archer, D.; Jaeger, C.
    We use a coupled climate-carbon cycle model of intermediate complexity to investigate scenarios of stratospheric sulfur injections as a measure to compensate for CO2-induced global warming. The baseline scenario includes the burning of 5,000 GtC of fossil fuels. A full compensation of CO2-induced warming requires a load of about 13 MtS in the stratosphere at the peak of atmospheric CO2 concentration. Keeping global warming below 2°C reduces this load to 9 MtS. Compensation of CO 2 forcing by stratospheric aerosols leads to a global reduction in precipitation, warmer winters in the high northern latitudes and cooler summers over northern hemisphere landmasses. The average surface ocean pH decreases by 0.7, reducing the calcifying ability of marine organisms. Because of the millennial persistence of the fossil fuel CO2 in the atmosphere, high levels of stratospheric aerosol loading would have to continue for thousands of years until CO2 was removed from the atmosphere. A termination of stratospheric aerosol loading results in abrupt global warming of up to 5°C within several decades, a vulnerability of the Earth system to technological failure. © 2008 The Author(s).
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    Sources, Occurrence and Characteristics of Fluorescent Biological Aerosol Particles Measured Over the Pristine Southern Ocean
    (Hoboken, NJ : Wiley, 2021) Moallemi, Alireza; Landwehr, Sebastian; Robinson, Charlotte; Simó, Rafel; Zamanillo, Marina; Chen, Gang; Baccarini, Andrea; Schnaiter, Martin; Henning, Silvia; Modini, Robin L.; Gysel-Beer, Martin; Schmale, Julia
    In this study, we investigate the occurrence of primary biological aerosol particles (PBAP) over all sectors of the Southern Ocean (SO) based on a 90-day data set collected during the Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition (ACE) in austral summer 2016-2017. Super-micrometer PBAP (1-16 µm diameter) were measured by a wide band integrated bioaerosol sensor (WIBS-4). Low (3σ) and high (9σ) fluorescence thresholds are used to obtain statistics on fluorescent and hyper-fluorescent PBAP, respectively. Our focus is on data obtained over the pristine ocean, that is, more than 200 km away from land. The results indicate that (hyper-)fluorescent PBAP are correlated to atmospheric variables associated with sea spray aerosol (SSA) particles (wind speed, total super-micrometer aerosol number concentration, chloride and sodium concentrations). This suggests that a main source of PBAP over the SO is SSA. The median percentage contribution of fluorescent and hyper-fluorescent PBAP to super-micrometer SSA was 1.6% and 0.13%, respectively. We demonstrate that the fraction of (hyper-)fluorescent PBAP to total super-micrometer particles positively correlates with concentrations of bacteria and several taxa of pythoplankton measured in seawater, indicating that marine biota concentrations modulate the PBAP source flux. We investigate the fluorescent properties of (hyper-)fluorescent PBAP for several events that occurred near land masses. We find that the fluorescence signal characteristics of particles near land is much more variable than over the pristine ocean. We conclude that the source and concentration of fluorescent PBAP over the open ocean is similar across all sampled sectors of the SO.
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    Variation of Ice Nucleating Particles in the European Arctic Over the Last Centuries
    (Hoboken, NJ [u.a.] : Wiley, 2019) Hartmann, M.; Blunier, T.; Brügger, S.O.; Schmale, J.; Schwikowski, M.; Vogel, A.; Wex, H.; Stratmann, F.
    The historical development of ice nucleating particle concentrations (NINP) is still unknown. Here, we present for the first time NINP from the past 500 years at two Arctic sites derived from ice core samples. The samples originate from the EUROCORE ice core (Summit, Central Greenland) and from the Lomo09 ice core (Lomonosovfonna, Svalbard). No long-term trend is obvious in the measured samples, and the overall range of NINP is comparable to present-day observations. We observe that the short-term variations in NINP is larger than the long-term variability, but neither anthropogenic pollution nor volcanic eruptions seem to have influenced NINP in the measured temperature range. Shape and onset temperature of several INP spectra suggest that INP of biogenic origin contributed to the Arctic INP population throughout the past. ©2019. The Authors.