Local climate change projections
We design tools to simulate expected changes in future climate and assess how they may affect us through risk and vulnerability analysis.
About the project
Effect of Climate Change on Pollutant Concentration under IPCC Sixth Report scenarios or EC6 is a study funded by the call for research projects for non-profit foundations granted by the Ministry for Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge during the year 2022.
Objectives
EC6 aims to use the conclusions drawn from previous work and apply them to climate projections using state-of-the-art CMIP6 models. In this sense, we seek:
- Determine the analogous days that may cause a risk threshold to be exceeded.
- Characterize analogous days by classifying the most common scenarios leading to risk scenarios.
- Generate climate projections for the analogous days conducive to the concentration of pollutants in the lower layers of the troposphere, based on the most updated global warming scenarios (associated with the sixth report of the IPCC, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).
Results
Among its main results, the following stand out:
- For Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2): The trend is essentially decreasing. Although previous work showed that most observatories did not exceed the critical threshold established by Spanish legislation – largely because the observatories are located far from emission sources such as roads, and the basins are mostly well ventilated – the projections show an increase in turbulence in this peninsular region. This turbulence is not temporally homogeneous, but is circumscribed to the warmer months: during the meteorological summer, and the months of September and May. Therefore, it is highly probable that in the future the concentrations of this pollutant will be lower during most of the year, although it is not incompatible with maintaining critical days in winter, which is when the concentration peaks of this gas are traditionally reached.
- For particulate matter (PM2.5): the trend is slightly increasing, and as with nitrogen dioxide, this variation is not homogeneous throughout the year. Upward trends are observed in the case of autumn or spring, especially at the end of the century, although it should be noted that these are more noticeable the worse the emissions scenario (the SSP3-7.0 and SSP4-8.5 scenarios). This variation is especially explained by changes in the general atmospheric circulation patterns, showing scenarios more prone to aerosol and dust advection in the future.
- These projections are decoupled with respect to the evolution of anthropogenic pollutants, since they only take into account the similarity of the episodes of maximum concentration with respect to the atmospheric circulation that facilitates the surface accumulation of these particles. In other words, if environmental legislation is strengthened in the future and the downward trend in the emission of harmful particles continues, the fall observed in the case of nitrogen dioxide could be boosted, or the upward trend in the case of particulate matter could be partially counteracted, for which public policies are and will be of enormous importance in the future evolution of air quality.
Funded by
Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge through grants to third-sector entities or non-governmental organizations that carry out activities of general interest considered to be of social interest in the field of scientific and technical research and environmental protection under state jurisdiction. This research has been funded by the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge but does not express its opinion.
