Climatea Journal Club

Date: 

Tuesday, September 19, 2017, 3:00pm

Location: 

Seminar Room MCZ, 429

Speaker: Packard Chan

Packard will be presenting the paper "Weather conditions conducive to Beijing severe haze more frequent under climate change", by Cai et al 2017.

"The number of winter-time haze days in Beijing has increased substantially in recent decades. Other than higher emission of pollutants in recent years, weather condition changes could also drive more frequent haze events. This paper looked at this possibility by defining a haze weather index (HWI) which describes haze-favorable weather conditions. Using RCP8.5 runs in CMIP5, they projected a 50% increase in days with HWI>1 for 2050-2099 compared to 1950-1999. Upward trend of Arctic Oscillation, weakened East Asian winter monsoon, and more stable atmosphere are believed to support the increasing frequency of conducive weather conditions. While most of the results in this paper rely on HWI they constructed, there are some other indices in literature that are used for similar purposes (e.g. Horton et al. 2014, also attached), which could also be useful in the discussion."

cai2017natureclimate.pdf7.65 MB