ABSTRACT:
The Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis (CCCma) has recently participated in writing a new assessment report on Short-lived Climate Forcers (SLCFs), as a part of the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) Expert Group on SLCFs. Short-lived climate forcers play an important role in Earth's climate, having both warming and cooling effects on shorter time scales than CO2, and having complicated and highly uncertain interactions and feedbacks with clouds and deposition. SLCFs do double-duty by also having detrimental air quality and health impacts, thus it is important to simulate them well to inform government policy. The work with AMAP has been an opportunity for CCCma to assess its current ability to simulate SLCFs and make plans for further model development, all within a comparative, international framework with 17 other atmospheric models. In this talk, I will provide information on SLCF modelling capabilities via the model evaluation that was completed for the AMAP assessment report and subsequent publications. I will also present simulated future climate impacts that SLCFs have on Arctic temperature, sea ice extent and precipitation from 2015-2050 assuming status quo and mitigation emission scenarios. Then, I will discuss our plans at CCCma to improve our modelling capabilities through collaboration with academic and government partners: plans such as new lightning and deposition schemes, the addition of a more sophisticated and interactive wildfire module, and the integration of the climate model with ECCC's air quality model in order to project how climate change will impact Canada's future air quality.