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Impacts of regional climate change on air quality projections and associated uncertainties

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Abstract

A 2-degree global warming is likely to affect the production, deposition, and transport of air pollutants, leading to impacts on air quality and health. In the present study we use an ensemble of four regional chemistry-transport models, driven by meteorological data from different climate models, to assess such changes and their uncertainties for PM2.5 and SOMO35. Changes and uncertainties are compared to the inter-model variability. We find that the impact of regional climate change on PM2.5, averaged over the model ensemble, ranges from −0.5 μg.m−3 to +1.3 μg.m−3 over Europe. It mainly results from changes in natural and biogenic emissions, such as desert dust, sea salt and biogenic VOCs. Statistically significant decreases in PM2.5 are found over southwestern Russia and Ukraine as well as an increase over Southern Spain. Modeled changes in summer ozone levels range from −1.7 to 1.6 ppbv. We find a smaller ensemble-mean evolution of SOMO35 as compared to inter-model variability. We also investigate the uncertainty due to inter-decadal variability and find that 10-year periods may not be sufficient to allow the detection of statistically significant change signals.

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Acknowledgments

This work was funded by the EU FP7 project IMPACT2C, grant agreement no.282746. Most of the work on anthropogenic emissions has been performed by IIASA under the EU FP7 project ECLIPSE, grant agreement no. 282688. This work has also received funding from the ACCEPTED project, which is supported by the ERA-ENVHEALTH network (grant agreement no. 219337), and from ANSES, ADEME, BelSPO, UBA as well as the Swedish EPA.

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  1. Gwendoline Lacressonnière

    Present address: ARIA-Technologies, Boulogne-Billancourt, France

Authors and Affiliations

  1. IPSL/LISA, CNRS/INSU, Créteil, France

    Gwendoline Lacressonnière, Gilles Foret, Matthias Beekmann & Guillaume Siour

  2. SMHI, Norrköping, Sweden

    Magnuz Engardt & Camilla Andersson

  3. EMEP MSC-W, Norwegian Meteorological Institute, Oslo, Norway

    Michael Gauss & Agnes Nyiri

  4. CNRM-GAME, Météo-France and CNRS, Toulouse, France

    Laura Watson, Béatrice Josse & Virginie Marécal

  5. INERIS, Verneuil-en-Halatte, France

    Augustin Colette

  6. IPSL/LSCE, CEA/CNRS/UVSQ, Gif-sur-Yvette, France

    Gwendoline Lacressonnière & Robert Vautard

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  1. Gwendoline Lacressonnière
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Correspondence to Gwendoline Lacressonnière.

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Lacressonnière, G., Foret, G., Beekmann, M. et al. Impacts of regional climate change on air quality projections and associated uncertainties. Climatic Change 136, 309–324 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-016-1619-z

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