Pre-industrial Southern Hemisphere biomass burning variability inferred from ice core carbon monoxide records ...
Biomass burning plays an important role in climate-forcing and atmospheric chemistry. The drivers of fire activity over the past two centuries, however, are hotly debated and fuelled by poor constraints on the magnitude and trends of pre-industrial fire regimes. As a powerful tracer of biomass burni...
| Main Authors: | , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
National Academy of Sciences
2024
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://dx.doi.org/10.17863/cam.109552 https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/369969 |
| Summary: | Biomass burning plays an important role in climate-forcing and atmospheric chemistry. The drivers of fire activity over the past two centuries, however, are hotly debated and fuelled by poor constraints on the magnitude and trends of pre-industrial fire regimes. As a powerful tracer of biomass burning, reconstructions of paleo-atmospheric carbon monoxide (CO) can provide valuable information on the evolution of fire activity across the pre-industrial to industrial transition. Here too, however, significant disagreements between existing CO records currently allow for opposing fire histories. In this study, we reconstruct a continuous record of Antarctic ice core CO between 1822 and 1995 CE to overlap with direct atmospheric observations. Our record indicates that the Southern Hemisphere CO burden ([CO]) increased by 50% from a pre-industrial mixing ratio of ca. 35 ppb to ca. 53 ppb by 1995 CE but with a greater level of variability than allowed for by state-of-the-art chemistry-climate models, suggesting ... |
|---|