Aerosols: This is how the floating particles affect climate change

You may have heard of aerosols for the first time in connection with Corona. However, the tiny particles or droplets also play a role elsewhere – including in climate change.

Aerosol is a word created from the ancient Greek word for air (aer) and the Latin word for solution (solutio). Aerosols are substances dissolved in the air. These can be solid particles or liquid droplets. With a size of about one nanometer up to 100 micrometers aerosols are according to the Education server wiki invisible to the naked eye. Nevertheless, aerosols, which can have a wide variety of shapes and properties, play a role in many areas of life.

• When we exhale, speak, cough or sneeze, we disperse tiny particles of spit in the air. Some Viruses, like the Sars-CoV-2 coronavirus, can use such aerosols transfer will.
• Diverse aerosols determine ours Air quality – They come from spray cans or exhaust pipes, for example. According to the Bildungsserver-Wiki, there are millions of premature deaths each year with pollutants from combustion fossil fuels in connection.
• Further up in the the atmosphere Aerosols have a major impact on the weather and, in the longer term, on the climate. We’ll take a closer look at this influence in this article.

Aerosols in the atmosphere: where do they come from?

Like the German weather service (DWD), aerosols in the atmosphere can be divided into two groups:

• The primary aerosols enter the atmosphere as aerosols. They come from a wide variety of natural and anthropogenic (i.e. man-made) processes such as volcanic eruptions, traffic, sandstorms or combustion processes. Less obvious: Even when biomass decomposes and seawater evaporates, aerosols are formed.
• The secondary aerosols arise only through reactions in the atmosphere. For example, educate yourself Sulfur dioxide (a by-product of burns involving sulfur) and other substances sulphate aerosols.

Aerosols can linger in the atmosphere for between a few minutes and a few years, depending on their nature and location. According to the Bildungsserver-Wiki, aircraft exhaust gases are particularly durable in the stratosphere. Small aerosols often combine to form larger particles or droplets in the course of their life. They disappear from the atmosphere by being deposited on the earth’s surface or being washed out by precipitation.

This is how aerosols affect the climate and weather

Depending on their nature, aerosols interact with one another and with solar radiation in a wide variety of ways. In particular, the interaction between clouds and aerosols is, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) so far not well researched. In the simulations of the future climate, aerosols and clouds are therefore responsible for the greatest uncertainty factors. Basically, aerosols often act as condensation nuclei for water vapor and therefore favor the formation of clouds.

Again IPCC explained, aerosols are generally more effective opposite to greenhouse gases. The latter allow visible light to pass through, but absorb thermal radiation in the infrared range. That’s why they heat the atmosphere – that’s the greenhouse effect. In the case of aerosols, the interaction with the light depends on their nature and their location in the atmosphere – overall, however, they are more transparent to thermal radiation and reflect the visible part of the sunlight. This means that less sunlight hits the earth and the earth tends to be cooler. At the same time, the aerosols allow the thermal radiation emanating from the earth to escape into space.

The IPCC concludes from this that aerosols are the Climate change have so far dampened rather than intensified. However, this could change in the future, as there will be fewer aerosols due to air pollution control measures.

This mechanism illustrates the far-reaching effects aerosols can have on the weather: Aerosols cool the water above the oceans because they reflect sunlight. As a result, less water evaporates – and consequently there is less rainfall in some regions. According to Bildungsserver-Wiki, such a process was probably what triggered the Sahel drought in the 1970s and 80s.

Because aerosols tend to have a cooling effect, they are also an important candidate for Geoengineering methodsaccording to the IPCC. Cool the earth by artificially introducing aerosols into the atmosphere? Until we fully understand how aerosols affect the weather and climate, it sounds like a risky endeavor.

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