Apostolos Voulgarakis

Imperial College London | Imperial · Department of Physics

Wildfires are significant contributors to atmospheric gases and aerosols, impacting air quality and composition. This pollution from fires also affects radiative forcing, influencing short‐term weather patterns and climate dynamics. Our research employs the Weather Research and Forecasting model coupled with Chemistry (WRF‐Chem) to investigate the...

Rapid shifts in fire regimes around the world raise critical questions about the rising impact of fire on climate, policy, and planetary health in the coming decades. To quantify these impacts, global climate modelling is needed to project how future fire regimes may evolve. One set of future fire estimates are included in the Shared Socioeconomic...

Fire is an integral ecosystem process and a major natural source of vegetation disturbance globally. Yet at the same time, humans use and manage fire in diverse ways and for a huge range of purposes. Therefore, it is perhaps unsurprising that a central finding of the first Fire Model Intercomparison Project was simplistic representation of humans i...

Peat fires in the northern high latitudes have the potential to burn vast amounts of carbon-rich organic soil, releasing large quantities of long-term stored carbon to the atmosphere. Due to anthropogenic activities and climate change, peat fires are increasing in frequency and intensity across the high latitudes. However, at present they are not e...

In the Anthropocene, humans are the largest drivers of change in vegetation fire regimes. Humans influence fire regimes both directly, by starting, managing and extinguishing fires, and also indirectly by altering fuel composition and connectivity. However, whilst vegetation fire is a coupled socio-ecological process, representation of human influe...

The climate science community aims to improve our understanding of climate change due to anthropogenic influences on atmospheric composition and the Earth's surface. Yet not all climate interactions are fully understood, and uncertainty in climate model results persists, as assessed in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) ass...

Future African aerosol emissions, and therefore air pollution levels and health outcomes, are uncertain and understudied. Understanding the future health impacts of pollutant emissions from this region is crucial. Here, this research gap is addressed by studying the range in the future health impacts of aerosol emissions from Africa in the Shared S...

Fire is an integral ecosystem process and a major natural source of vegetation disturbance globally. Yet at the same time, humans use and manage fire in diverse ways and for a huge range of purposes. Therefore, it is perhaps unsurprising that a central finding of the first Fire Model Intercomparison Project was simplistic representation of humans i...

Peat fires in the Northern high latitudes have the potential to burn vast amounts of carbon rich organic soil, releasing large quantities of long-term stored carbon to the atmosphere. Due to anthropogenic activities and climate change, peat fires are increasing in frequency and intensity across the high latitudes. However, at present they are not e...

Fire plays an important role in the complex physical interactions between the processes which define our planet’s environments, and wildfires are considered to have a negative and unwanted effect, owing to the destruction of ecosystems and property that they often produce. In this paper, fractal and spectral methods are used to analyze the spatial cha...

Future African aerosol emissions, and therefore air pollution levels and health outcomes, are uncertain. Here, the range in the future impacts of African emissions in the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) scenarios is studied, using the Earth System Model UKESM1 along with human health concentration-response functions. Using present-day demographi...

Humans can act as fire starters or suppressors, changing fire regimes by increasing the number of ignitions, changing their timing, and altering fuel structure and abundance, which can be considered a human–environmental coupling. Considering the human influences on fire activity, representing socio-economic impacts on fires in global fire models is...

Airborne particles are known climate drivers whilst the impact of microorganisms is investigated with increasing interest. The particle number size distribution (0.012-10 μm), PM10 concentrations, bacterial communities and cultivable microorganisms (bacteria and fungi) were measured simultaneously throughout a yearly campaign at a suburban location...

The increased frequency and severity of wildfires in the Mediterranean region generates significant damages in ecosystems and landscapes while harming human populations. Institutional complexities, along with socioeconomic and demographic changes encouraging development into the wildland-urban interface, rural abandon-ment, and focus on fire suppre...

The climate science community aims to improve our understanding of climate change due to anthropogenic influences on atmospheric composition and the Earth's surface. Yet not all climate interactions are fully understood and diversity in climate model experiments persists as assessed in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) ass...

Large peatland fires in equatorial Asia during recent El Niño years have resulted in widespread smoke pollution, with record-breaking impacts on air quality and carbon emissions. Here we show that large fires during El Niño years also create a negative feedback on El Niño intensity and regional teleconnections. By comparing climate model simulation...

The potential future trend in African aerosol emissions is uncertain, with a large range found in future scenarios used to drive climate projections. The future climate impact of these emissions is therefore uncertain. Using the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) scenarios, transient future experiments were performed with the UK Earth System Model...

The climate system responds to changes in the amount of atmospheric greenhouse gases or aerosols through rapid processes, triggered within hours and days, and through slower processes, where the full response may only be seen after centuries. In this paper, we aim to elucidate the mechanisms operating on time scales of hours to years to better unde...

Precipitation has increased across the arid Central Asia region over recent decades. However, the underlying mechanisms of this trend are poorly understood. Here, we analyze multi-model simulations from the Precipitation Driver and Response Model Intercomparison Project (PDRMIP) to investigate potential drivers of the observed precipitation trend....

The potential future trend in African aerosol emissions is uncertain, with a large range found in future scenarios used to drive climate projections. The future climate impact of these emissions is therefore uncertain. Using the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) scenarios, transient future experiments were performed with the UK Earth System Model...

Wildfire is an integral part of the Earth system, but at the same time it can pose serious threats to human society and to certain types of terrestrial ecosystems. Meteorological conditions are a key driver of wildfire activity and extent, which led to the emergence of the use of fire danger indices that depend solely on weather conditions. The Can...

Recent studies have shown that temperature and precipitation in the Mediterranean are expected to change, contributing to longer and more intense summer droughts that even extend out of season. In connection to this, the frequency of forest fire occurrence and intensity will likely increase. In the present study, the changes in future fire danger c...

This data descriptor reports the main scientific values from General Circulation Models (GCMs) in the Precipitation Driver and Response Model Intercomparison Project (PDRMIP). The purpose of the GCM simulations has been to enhance the scientific understanding of how changes in greenhouse gases, aerosols, and incoming solar radiation perturb the Ear...

Fire constitutes a key process in the Earth system (ES), being driven by climate as well as affecting the climate by changing atmospheric composition and impacting the terrestrial carbon cycle. However, studies on the effects of fires on atmospheric composition, radiative forcing and climate have been limited to date, as the current generation of E...

For the radiative impact of individual climate forcings, most previous studies focused on the global mean values at the top of the atmosphere (TOA), and less attention has been paid to surface processes, especially for black carbon (BC) aerosols. In this study, the surface radiative responses to five different forcing agents were analyzed by using...

Atmospheric blocking events are mid-latitude weather patterns, which obstruct the usual path of the polar jet streams. They are often associated with heat waves in summer and cold snaps in winter. Despite being central features of mid-latitude synoptic-scale weather, there is no well-defined historical dataset of blocking events. Various blocking i...

The seasonal and longer-term dynamics of fuel accumulation affect fire seasonality and the occurrence of extreme wildfires. Failure to account for their influence may help to explain why state-of-the-art fire models do not simulate the length and timing of the fire season or interannual variability in burnt area well. We investigated the impact of...

For the radiative impact of individual climate forcings, most previous studies focused on the global mean values at the top of the atmosphere (TOA) and less attention has been paid to surface processes, especially for black carbon aerosols. In this study, the surface radiative responses to five different forcing agents were analyzed by using ideali...

Interactions between aerosols and gases in the atmosphere have been the focus of an increasing number of studies in recent years. Here, we focus on aerosol effects on tropospheric ozone that involve meteorological feedbacks induced by aerosol–radiation interactions. Specifically, we study the effects that involve aerosol influences on the transport...

Understanding and estimating regional climate change under different anthropogenic emission scenarios is pivotal for informing societal adaptation and mitigation measures. However, the high computational complexity of state-of-the-art climate models remains a central bottleneck in this endeavour. Here we introduce a machine learning approach, which...

Rapid adjustments occur after initial perturbation of an external climate driver (e.g., CO2) and involve changes in, e.g. atmospheric temperature, water vapour and clouds, independent of sea surface temperature changes. Knowledge of such adjustments is necessary to estimate effective radiative forcing (ERF), a useful indicator of surface temperatur...

Interactions between aerosols and gases in the atmosphere have been the focus of an increasing number of studies in recent years. Here, we focus on aerosol effects on tropospheric ozone that involve meteorological feedbacks induced by aerosol-radiation interactions. Specifically, we study the effects that involve aerosol influences on the transport...

Quantifying the efficacy of different climate forcings is important for understanding the real‐world climate sensitivity. This study presents a systematic multimodel analysis of different climate driver efficacies using simulations from the Precipitation Driver and Response Model Intercomparison Project (PDRMIP). Efficacies calculated from instanta...

We compare six methods of estimating effective radiative forcing (ERF) using a set of atmosphere‐ocean general circulation models. This is the first multiforcing agent, multimodel evaluation of ERF values calculated using different methods. We demonstrate that previously reported apparent consistency between the ERF values derived from fixed sea su...

Supporting Information S1

Supporting Information S1

Rapid adjustments are responses to forcing agents that cause a perturbation to the top of atmosphere energy budget but are uncoupled to changes in surface warming. Different mechanisms are responsible for these adjustments for a variety of climate drivers. These remain to be quantified in detail. It is shown that rapid adjustments reduce the effect...

Different climate drivers influence precipitation in different ways. Here we use radiative kernels to understand the influence of rapid adjustment processes on precipitation in climate models. Rapid adjustments are generally triggered by the initial heating or cooling of the atmosphere from an external climate driver. For precipitation changes, rap...

The response of the hydrological cycle to climate forcings can be understood within the atmospheric energy budget framework. In this study precipitation and energy budget responses to five forcing agents are analyzed using 10 climate models from the Precipitation Driver Response Model Intercomparison Project (PDRMIP). Precipitation changes are spli...

The South Asian summer monsoon has been suggested to be influenced by atmospheric aerosols, and this influence can be the result of either local or remote emissions. We have used the Hadley Centre Global Environment Model Version 3 (HadGEM3) coupled atmosphere-ocean climate model to investigate for the first time the centennial-scale South Asian pr...

Globally, latent heating associated with a change in precipitation is balanced by changes to atmospheric radiative cooling and sensible heat fluxes. Both components can be altered by climate forcing mechanisms and through climate feedbacks, but the impacts of climate forcing and feedbacks on sensible heat fluxes have received much less attention. H...

Future projections of east Amazonian precipitation indicate drying, but they are uncertain and poorly understood. In this study we analyse the Amazonian precipitation response to individual atmospheric forcings using a number of global climate models. Black carbon is found to drive reduced precipitation over the Amazon due to temperature-driven cir...

Atmospheric aerosols such as sulfate and black carbon (BC) generate inhomogeneous radiative forcing and can affect precipitation in distinct ways compared to greenhouse gases (GHGs). Their regional effects on the atmospheric energy budget and circulation can be important for understanding and predicting global and regional precipitation changes, wh...

Climate change: Global warming increases rainfall most over oceans Global warming leads to more rain – but little of the change occurs over land. An international team of researchers, led by Bjørn H. Samset at the Norwegian CICERO Center for Climate Research, used ten global climate models to study how precipitation changes when just one factor in...

As the global temperature increases with changing climate, precipitation rates and patterns are affected through a wide range of physical mechanisms. The globally averaged intensity of extreme precipitation also changes more rapidly than the globally averaged precipitation rate. While some aspects of the regional variation in precipitation predicte...

Precipitation is expected to respond differently to various drivers of anthropogenic climate change. We present the first results from the Precipitation Driver and Response Model Intercomparison Project (PDRMIP), where nine global climate models have perturbed CO2, CH4, black carbon, sulfate, and solar insolation. We divide the resulting changes to...

Biomass burning impacts vegetation dynamics, biogeochemical cycling, atmospheric chemistry, and climate, with sometimes deleterious socio-economic impacts. Under future climate projections it is often expected that the risk of wildfires will increase. Our ability to predict the magnitude and geographic pattern of future fire impacts rests on our ab...

We use the HadGEM3-GA4, CESM1, and GISS ModelE2 climate models to investigate the global and regional aerosol burden, radiative flux, and surface temperature responses to removing anthropogenic sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions from China. We find that the models differ by up to a factor of six in the simulated change in aerosol optical depth (AOD) an...

Recent cumulus and turbulence parameterization changes to the NASA GISS ModelE2 have improved representation of the Madden-Julian Oscillation and low cloud distribution, but their effect on composition-related quantities is not known. In this study, we simulate the vertical transport of carbon monoxide (CO) from uncontrolled biomass burning in Indo...

Fires impact atmospheric composition through their emissions, which range from long-lived gases to short-lived gases and aerosols. Effects are typically larger in the tropics and boreal regions but can also be substantial in highly populated areas in the northern mid-latitudes. In all regions, fire can impact air quality and health. Similarly, its...

Fires are responsible for a range of gaseous and aerosol emissions. However, their influence on the interannual variability of atmospheric trace gases and aerosols has not been systematically investigated from a global perspective. We examine biomass burning emissions as a driver of interannual variability of large-scale abundances of short-lived c...

North American wildfire management teams routinely assess burned area on site during firefighting campaigns; meanwhile, satellite observations provide systematic and global burned-area data. Here we compare satellite and ground-based daily burned area for wildfire events for selected large fires across North America in 2007 on daily timescales. In...

We examine the anthropogenically forced climate response for the 21st century representative concentration pathway (RCP) emission scenarios and their extensions for the period 2101-2500. The experiments were performed with ModelE2, a new version of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Sciences (GISS) coupled general circulation model that includes...

Clouds directly affect tropospheric photochemistry through modification of solar radiation that determines photolysis frequencies. This effect is an important component of global tropospheric chemistry-climate interaction, and its understanding is thus essential for predicting the feedback of climate change on tropospheric chemistry. Our previous s...

Fire emissions associated with tropical land use change and maintenance influence atmospheric composition, air quality, and climate. In this study, we explore the effects of representing fire emissions at daily versus monthly resolution in a global composition-climate model. We find that simulations of aerosols are impacted more by the temporal res...

Observations of climate change during the CMIP5 extended historical period (1850-2012) are compared to trends simulated by six versions of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies ModelE2 Earth System Model. The six models are constructed from three versions of the ModelE2 atmospheric general circulation model, distinguished by their treatment...

We present a description of the ModelE2 version of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) General Circulation Model (GCM) and the configurations used in the simulations performed for the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5). We use six variations related to the treatment of the atmospheric composition, the calculation of ae...

In this paper, we present a description of the tropospheric chemistry component of the UK Chemistry and Aerosols (UKCA) model which has been coupled to the Met Office Hadley Centre's HadGEM family of climate models. We assess the model's transport and scavenging processes, in particular focussing on convective transport, boundary layer mixing, wet...

Methane is an important greenhouse gas, responsible for about 20% of the warming induced by long-lived greenhouse gases since pre-industrial times. By reacting with hydroxyl radicals, methane reduces the oxidizing capacity of the atmosphere and generates ozone in the troposphere. Although most sources and sinks of methane have been identified, thei...