Our motivation

Our goal is to produce understanding relevant for both the scientific community and for stakeholders considering near-term emissions mitigation and adaptation policy.

Anthropogenic aerosol emissions are expected to change rapidly over the coming decades, driving strong, spatially complex trends in temperature, hydroclimate, and extreme events both near and far from emission sources. However, as these trends are concurrent with greenhouse gas induced changes, and often of opposite sign, they are challenging to identify in simulations that include multiple forcing agents. 

Similarly, aerosol emissions have effects both near to, and far from, the emission source. Hence, their regional influence is challenging to extract in simulations that include multiple sources. 

Finally, realistic changes in aerosol emissions are likely to be transient, with gradual reductions or decreases on the scale of decades. This results in quite different climate impacts to the idealised step perturbations that have so far often been studied by the aerosol-climate community. In RAMIP, we therefore perform a coordinated set of single forcer (aerosol), single region (India, China, Africa/Middle East and Europe/US) transient emission change simulations, with the goal of producing understanding relevant for both the scientific community and for stakeholders considering near-term emissions mitigation and adaptation policy.