A Cooperating Network Agreement between NDACC and the European Brewer Network (EUBREWNET) was finalized on 19 April 2021.
As a result of this agreement, John Rimmer (University of Manchester) and Alberto Redondas (State Meteorological Agency of Spain (AEMET) and the NDACC Brewer Working Group Representative) have been named EUBREWNET Co-Representatives to the NDACC Steering Committee.
The NDACC Lidar Working Group (LWG) has relocated and redesigned its website. The new website URL is https://lidar.jpl.nasa.gov/ndacc/index_ndacc.php. The website features a review of the NDACC lidar stations and instruments, with new links and functionality to check data availability and access them. Fine-tuning of the website content will continue over the upcoming weeks.
Updates and corrections to the GMI chemical mechanism and its input files have been used to create a new Hindcast simulation with MERRA2 meteorology. The changes compared to the previous GMI simulation are generally small and you probably won’t see any large impacts on chemical constituents. The greatest impacts are on temporal and spatial evolution of polar ozone depletion and on NOy partitioning globally due a change in stratospheric sulfate surface area. Mechanism and input changes are listed below.
Nitrous oxide (N2O) is the third most important greenhouse gas (GHG) after carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4). Its global warming potential is about 300 times larger than CO2 for a 100 year timescale. Surface in-situ observations show that N2O is steadily rising since the 1970’s. This positive trend is mostly caused by the rapid increase of the worldwide use of nitrogen fertilizers in the agricultural practices.
Worldwide efforts to contain spreading of the COVID-19 pandemic have reduced emissions from surface traffic by about 15% on average over the year 2020. Air-traffic (and emissions) went down by 40% on average.
Traffic is a main source of nitrogen oxides in the atmosphere, and much of the ozone in the troposphere is produced by photochemical reactions involving nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds (VOCs).