Earth Systems

Ocean colour signature of climate change

Abstract: Monitoring changes in marine phytoplankton is important as they form the foundation of the marine food web and are crucial in the carbon cycle. Often Chlorophyll-a (Chl-a) is used to track changes in phytoplankton, since there are global, regular satellite-derived estimates. However, satellite sensors do not measure Chl-a directly. Instead, Chl-a is estimated from remote sensing reflectance (RRS): the ratio of upwelling radiance to the downwelling irradiance at the ocean’s surface. Using a model, we show that RRS in the blue-green spectrum is likely to have a stronger and earlier climate-change-driven signal than Chl-a. This is because RRS has lower natural variability and integrates not only changes to in-water Chl-a, but also alterations in other optically important constituents. Phytoplankton community structure, which strongly affects ocean optics, is likely to show one of the clearest and most rapid signatures of changes to the base of the marine ecosystem.

Climate change is causing significant changes to phytoplankton in the world’s oceans, and a new MIT study finds that over the coming decades these changes will affect the ocean’s color, intensifying its blue regions and its green ones. Satellites should detect these changes in hue, providing early warning of wide-scale changes to marine ecosystems.

Study: Much of the surface ocean will shift in color by end of 21st century
A Critical Time for Mercury Science to Inform Global Policy

Mercury is a global pollutant released into the biosphere by varied human activities including coal combustion, mining, artisanal gold mining, cement production, and chemical production. Once released to air, land and water, the addition of carbon atoms to mercury by bacteria results in the production of methylmercury, the toxic form that bioaccumulates in aquatic and terrestrial food chains resulting in elevated exposure to humans and wildlife. Global recognition of the mercury contamination problem has resulted in the Minamata Convention on Mercury, which came into force in 2017. The treaty aims to protect human health and the environment from human-generated releases of mercury curtailing its movement and transformations in the biosphere. Coincident with the treaty's coming into force, the 13th International Conference of Mercury as a Global Pollutant (ICMGP-13) was held in Providence, Rhode Island USA. At ICMGP-13, cutting edge research was summarized and presented to address questions relating to global and regional sources and cycling of mercury, how that mercury is methylated, the effects of mercury exposure on humans and wildlife, and the science needed for successful implementation of the Minamata Convention. Human activities have the potential to enhance mercury methylation by remobilizing previously released mercury, and increasing methylation efficiency. This synthesis concluded that many of the most important factors influencing the fate and effects of mercury and its more toxic form, methylmercury, stem from environmental changes that are much broader in scope than mercury releases alone. Alterations of mercury cycling, methylmercury bioavailability and trophic transfer due to climate and land use changes remain critical uncertainties in effective implementation of the Minamata Convention. In the face of these uncertainties, important policy and management actions are needed over the short-term to support the control of mercury releases to land, water and air. These include adequate monitoring and communication on risk from exposure to various forms of inorganic mercury as well as methylmercury from fish and rice consumption. Successful management of global and local mercury pollution will require integration of mercury research and policy in a changing world.

Understanding factors influencing the detection of mercury policies in modelled Laurentian Great Lakes wet deposition

We used chemical transport modelling to better understand the extent to which policy-related anthropogenic mercury emissions changes (a policy signal) can be statistically detected in wet deposition measurements in the Great Lakes region on the subdecadal scale, given sources of noise. In our modelling experiment, we consider hypothetical regional (North American) and global (rest of the world) policy changes, consistent with existing policy efforts (Δglobal = −18%; Δregional = −30%) that divide an eight-year period. The magnitude of statistically significant (p < 0.1) pre- and post-policy period wet deposition differences, holding all else constant except for the policy change, ranges from −0.3 to −2.0% for the regional policy and −0.8 to −2.7% for the global policy. We then introduce sources of noise—trends and variability in factors that are exogenous to the policy action—and evaluate the extent to which the policy signals can still be detected. For instance, technology-related variability in emissions magnitude and speciation can shift the magnitude of differences between periods, in some cases dampening the policy effect. We have found that the interannual variability in meteorology has the largest effect of the sources of noise considered, driving deposition differences between periods to ±20%, exceeding the magnitude of the policy signal. However, our simulations suggest that gaseous elemental mercury concentration may be more robust to this meteorological variability in this region, and a stronger indicator of local/regional emissions changes. These results highlight the potential challenges of detecting statistically significant policy-related changes in Great Lakes wet deposition within the subdecadal scale.

Rapid increase in ozone-depleting chloroform emissions from China

ABSTRACT: Chloroform contributes to the depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer. However, due to its short lifetime and predominantly natural sources, it is not included in the Montreal Protocol that regulates the production and uses of ozone-depleting substances. Atmospheric chloroform mole fractions were relatively stable or slowly decreased during 1990–2010. Here we show that global chloroform mole fractions increased after 2010, based on in situ chloroform measurements at seven stations around the world. We estimate that the global chloroform emissions grew at the rate of 3.5% yr−1 between 2010 and 2015 based on atmospheric model simulations. We used two regional inverse modelling approaches, combined with observations from East Asia, to show that emissions from eastern China grew by 49 (41–59) Gg between 2010 and 2015, a change that could explain the entire increase in global emissions. We suggest that if chloroform emissions continuously grow at the current rate, the recovery of the stratospheric ozone layer above Antarctica could be delayed by several years.

Jennifer Chu | MIT News Office 
December 20, 2018

Earlier this year, the United Nations announced some much-needed, positive news about the environment: The ozone layer, which shields the Earth from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation, and which was severely depleted by decades of human-derived, ozone-destroying chemicals, is on the road to recovery.

New threat to ozone recovery
Estimating Regional Nitrous Oxide Emissions Using Isotopic Ratio Observations and a Bayesian Inverse Framework

Atmospheric nitrous oxide (N2O) significantly impacts Earth’s climate due to its dual role as an inert potent greenhouse gas in the troposphere and as a reactive source of ozone-destroying nitrogen oxides in the stratosphere. Global atmospheric concentrations of N2O, produced by natural and anthropogenic processes, continue to rise due to increases in emissions linked to human activity. The understanding of the impact of this gas is incomplete as there remain significant uncertainties in its global budget. The experiment described in this thesis, in which a global chemical transport model (MOZART-4), a fine-scale regional Lagrangian model (NAME), and new high-frequency atmospheric observations are combined, shows that uncertainty in N2O emissions estimates can be reduced in areas with continuous monitoring of N2O mole fraction and site-specific isotopic ratios.

Due to unique heavy-atom (15N and 18O) isotopic substitutions made by different N2O sources, the measurement of N2O isotopic ratios in ambient air can help identify the distribution and magnitude of distinct sources. The new Stheno-TILDAS continuous wave laser spectroscopy instrument developed at MIT, recently installed at the Mace Head Atmospheric Research Station in western Ireland, can produce high-frequency timelines of atmospheric N2O isotopic ratios that can be compared to contemporaneous trends in correlative trace gas mole fractions and NAME-based statistical distributions of the origin of air sampled at the station. This combination leads to apportionment of the relative contribution from five major N2O sectors in the European region (agriculture, oceans, natural soils, industry, and biomass burning) plus well-mixed air transported from long distances to the atmospheric N2O measured at Mace Head.

Bayesian inverse modeling methods that compare N2O mole fraction and isotopic ratio observations at Mace Head and at Dübendorf, Switzerland to simulated conditions produced using NAME and MOZART-4 lead to an optimized set of source-specific N2O emissions estimates in the NAME Europe domain. Notably, this inverse modeling experiment leads to a significant decrease in uncertainty in summertime emissions for the four largest sectors in Europe, and shows that industrial and agricultural N2O emissions in Europe are underestimated in inventories such as EDGAR v4.3.2. This experiment sets up future work that will be able to help constrain global estimates of N2O emissions once additional isotopic observations are made in other global locations and integrated into the NAME-MOZART inverse modeling framework described in this thesis.

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