Climate extremes are on the rise. Impacts of extreme climate and weather events on ecosystem services and ultimately human well-being can be partially attenuated by the organismic, structural, and functional diversity of the affected land surface. However, the ongoing transformation of terrestrial ecosystems through intensified exploitation and management may put this buffering capacity at risk. Here, we summarise the evidence that reductions in biodiversity can destabilise the functioning of ecosystems facing climate extremes. We then explore if impaired ecosystem functioning could, in turn, exacerbate climate extremes. We argue that only a comprehensive approach, incorporating both ecological and hydrometeorological perspectives, enables to understand and predict the entire feedback system between altered biodiversity and climate extremes. This ambition, however, requires a reformulation of current research priorities to emphasise the bidirectional effects that link ecology and atmospheric processes.

Aerosol can affect clouds in various ways. Beside the micro-physical impact of aerosol particles on cloud formation, the interference of aerosol with atmospheric radiation leads to changes in local heating, surface fluxes and thus meso-scale circulations all of which may also modify clouds. Rather little is known about these so-called semi-direct effects in realistic settings-a reason, why this study investigates the impact of absorbing aerosol particles on cloud and radiation fields over Germany. Using advanced high-resolution simulations with grid spacings of 312 and 625 m, numerical experiments with different aerosol optical properties are contrasted using purely-scattering aerosol as control case and realistic absorbing aerosol as perturbation. The combined effect of surface dimming and atmospheric heating induces positive temperature and negative moisture anomalies between 800 and 900 hPa impacting low-level cloud formation. Decreased relative humidity as well as increased atmospheric stability below clouds lead to a reduction of low-level cloud cover, liquid water path and precipitation. It is further found that direct and semi-direct effects of absorbing aerosol forcing have similar magnitudes and equally contribute to a reduction of net radiation at the top of the atmosphere .

The Arctic climate changes at a faster rate than the rest of the globe. Boundary-layer clouds may play an important role to this change. At temperatures below 0°C, mixed-phase clouds exist and their phase and longevity is influenced by the abundance of ice crystals, which in turn is a function of aerosols serving as ice nucleating particles (INPs). Previous in-situ studies suggested a local source of INPs due to biological activity over open ocean. Here we investigate ice crystal concentrations in clouds below 2km at a large scale, by exploiting a newly-developed dataset - DARDAR-Nice - retrieved from active satellite remote sensing. The dataset spans from 2006-2016. Contrary to previous expectation, we find that at a given latitude and temperature, there are more ice crystals over sea ice than over open ocean. This enhancement is particularly found in clouds south of 70°N, but also at temperatures between 0 and -10°C.

Radiation management (RM) has been proposed as a conceivable climate engineering (CE) intervention to mitigate global warming. In this study, we use a coupled climate model (MPI-ESM) with a very idealized setup to investigate the efficacy and risks of CE at a local scale in space and time (regional radiation management, RRM) assuming that cloud modification is technically possible. RM is implemented in the climate model by the brightening of low-level clouds (solar radiation management, SRM) and thinning of cirrus (terrestrial radiation management, TRM). The region chosen is North America, and we simulate a period of 30 years. The implemented sustained RM resulted in a net local radiative forcing of -9.8 Wm and a local cooling of -0.8 K. Surface temperature (SAT) extremes (90 and 10 percentile) show negative anomalies in the target region. However, substantial climate impacts are also simulated outside the target area, with warming in the Arctic and pronounced precipitation change in the eastern Pacific. As a variant of RRM, a targeted intervention to suppress heat waves (HW) is investigated in further simulations by implementing intermittent cloud modification locally, prior to the simulated HW situations. The intermittent RRM results in most cases in a successful reduction of temperatures locally, with substantially smaller impacts outside the target area, compared to the sustained RRM.

Aerosols interact with radiation and clouds. Substantial progress made over the past 40 years in observing, understanding, and modeling these processes helped quantify the imbalance in the Earth’s radiation budget caused by anthropogenic aerosols, called aerosol radiative forcing, but uncertainties remain large. This poster presents the outcome of an international workshop and subsequent review paper, which quantify the likely range of aerosol radiative forcing over the industrial era based on multiple lines of evidence, including modelling approaches, theoretical considerations, and observations. Improved understanding of aerosol absorption and the causes of trends in surface radiative fluxes narrow the range of the forcing from aerosol-radiation interactions compared to the latest assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). A robust theoretical foundation and convincing evidence constrain the forcing caused by aerosol-driven increases in liquid cloud droplet number concentration. However, the influence of anthropogenic aerosols on cloud liquid water content and cloud fraction and on mixed-phase and ice clouds remains poorly constrained. Observed changes in surface temperature and radiative fluxes provide additional constraints. These multiple lines of evidence lead to total aerosol radiative forcing ranges that are of similar width to the last IPCC assessment but more clearly based on physical arguments.