PhD Defense

Aerosols act on the radiative budget of the planet by scattering and absorbing incoming radiation. They modify cloud albedo and surface albedo from highly reflective surfaces (snow- and ice-covered). Including these effects in a climate model is necessary to represent both the tendency and the variability exhibited by temperatures. This implies to account for aerosol loads that are regulated by sources and sink processes. In the first part of the presentation, I will show how I used in-situ and satellite observations to constrain the geographical distributions from desert dust, sea salts and carbonaceous aerosols.

Taking into account aerosols interactively in the coupled IPSL model allowed to discriminate the role of absorbing aerosols (black carbon and desert dust) on temperature and cloudiness. I will discuss in the second part of the talk the AR5 simulations that allowed us to analyze the influence of black carbon on temperatures and on the radiative budget.