Potential impacts of marine fuel regulations on Arctic clouds and radiative feedbacks

• Main Authors: Escusa dos Santos, Luís Filipe, Frostenberg, Hannah C., Baró Pérez, Alejandro, Ekman, Annica M. L., Ickes, Luisa, Thomson, Erik S.
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2024
• Subjects: albedo; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-1891; https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2024/egusphere-2024-1891/

Increased surface warming over the Arctic, triggered by increased greenhouse gas concentrations and feedback processes in the climate system, has been causing a steady decline in sea-ice extent and thickness. With the retreating sea-ice, shipping activity will likely increase in the future driven by economic activity and the potential for realizing time and fuel savings from transiting shorter trade routes. Moreover, over the last decade, the global shipping sector has been subject to regulatory changes, that affect the physicochemical properties of exhaust particles. International regulations aiming to reduce SO x and particulate matter (PM) emissions, mandate ships to burn fuels with reduced sulfur content or alternatively, use wet scrubbing as exhaust after-treatment when using fuels with sulfur contents exceeding regulatory limits. Compliance measures affect the physicochemical properties of exhaust particles and their cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) activity in different ways, with the potential to have both direct and indirect impacts on atmospheric processes such as the formation and lifetime of clouds. Given the relatively pristine Arctic environment, ship exhaust particle emissions could be a large perturbation to natural baseline Arctic aerosol concentrations. Low-level stratiform mixed-phase clouds cover large areas of the Arctic region and play an important role in the regional energy budget. Results from laboratory marine engine measurements, which investigated the impact of fuel sulfur content (FSC) reduction and wet scrubbing on exhaust particle properties, motivate the use of large eddy simulations to further investigate how such particles may influence the micro- and macrophysical properties of a stratiform mixed-phase cloud case observed during the Arctic Summer Cloud Ocean Study campaign. Simulated enhancements of ship exhaust particles predominantly affected the liquid-phase properties of the cloud and led to a decrease in liquid surface precipitation, increased cloud albedo and increased ...