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Age of stratospheric air is a well established metric for the stratospheric transport circulation. Rooted in a robust theoretical framework, this approach offers the benefit of being deducible from observations of trace gases. Given potential climate‐induced changes, observational constraints on stratospheric circulation are crucial. In the past two decades, scientific progress has been made in three main areas: (a) Enhanced process understanding and the development of process diagnostics led to better quantification of individual transport processes from observations and to a better understanding of model deficits. (b) The global age of air climatology is now well constrained by observations thanks to improved quality and quantity of data, including global satellite data, and through improved and consistent age calculation methods. (c) It is well established and understood that global models predict a decrease in age, that is, an accelerating stratospheric circulation, in response to forcing by greenhouse gases and ozone depleting substances. Observational records now confirm long‐term forced trends in mean age in the lower stratosphere. However, in the mid‐stratosphere, uncertainties in observational records are too large to confirm or disprove the model predictions. Continuous monitoring of stratospheric trace gases and further improved methods to derive age from those tracers will be crucial to better constrain variability and long‐term trends from observations. Future work on mean age as a metric for stratospheric transport will be important due to its potential to enhance the understanding of stratospheric composition changes, address climate model biases, and assess the impacts of proposed climate geoengineering methods.
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Scrutinizing countries’ climate commitments: Insights from recovery spending
The Global Stocktake of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change assesses countries’ collective progress toward holding warming to well below 2 C, or 1.5 C. In this commentary, we argue that governments’ fiscal responses to global economic shocks provide an important opportunity to investigate the credibility of climate pledges and progress.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2224086
- PAR ID:
- 10494938
- Publisher / Repository:
- Cell Press
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- One Earth
- Volume:
- 6
- Issue:
- 9
- ISSN:
- 2590-3322
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1082 to 1084
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2023.08.022
