UCAR Outstanding Publication 2019

Congratulation to Michael Mills, Anja Schmidt (University of Leeds), Richard Easter (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory), Susan Solomon (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Douglas Kinnison, Steven Ghan (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory), Ryan Neely III (University of Leeds), Daniel Marsh, Andrew Conley, Charles Bardeen, and Andrew Gettelman for the UCAR award of Oustanding Publication 2019.

Paper Citation:

Mills, M. J., Schmidt, A., Easter, R., Solomon, S., Kinnison, D. E., Ghan, S. J., III Neely, R. R., Marsh, D. R., Conley, A., Bardeen, C. G., et al. ( 2016), Global volcanic aerosol properties derived from emissions, 1990–2014, using CESM1(WACCM), J. Geophys. Res. Atmos., 121, 2332– 2348, doi:10.1002/2015JD024290.

Nomination:

This paper broke new ground in the representation of volcanic aerosols in global chemistry-climate models. The work involved development and validation of a new prognostic capability in CESM(WACCM) to simulate stratospheric sulfate, based on first principles of atmospheric chemistry, aerosol microphysics, and an extensive database of sulfur emissions from volcanic eruptions. The paper is the first to fully quantify the contribution of recent small-magnitude eruptions to stratospheric aerosol concentrations. The capability described in the paper has led to major new discoveries, in subsequent studies using CESM(WACCM) to assess the impacts of recent volcanic activities on both climate and stratospheric ozone recovery, as well as theoretical studies of geoengineering strategies. The work first described in this paper represents a leap forward in self-consistency, and is now a standard feature of CESM2(WACCM), which was released publicly in 2018.