Highlights
- Lamont-Doherty and MIT researchers found that warming could slightly increase the atmosphere’s supply of hydroxyl radicals, key molecules that help break down methane.
- While higher water vapor boosts these radicals, rising emissions from trees and other plants work in the opposite direction, making the overall effect more complex.
- Hydroxyl radicals also help remove ozone and other air pollutants, so the findings matter for both climate and air quality.
Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that is second only to carbon dioxide in driving up global temperatures. But it doesn’t linger in the atmosphere for long thanks to molecules called hydroxyl radicals, which are known as the “atmosphere’s detergent” for their ability to break down methane. As the planet warms, however, it’s unclear how the air-cleaning agents will respond.
Researchers from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are now shedding some light on this. The team has developed a new model to study different processes that control how levels of hydroxyl radical will shift with warming temperatures.
They find that the picture is complicated. As temperatures increase, so too will water vapor in the atmosphere, which will in turn boost the molecule’s concentrations. But rising temperatures will also increase “biogenic volatile organic compound emissions” — gases that are naturally released by some plants and trees. These natural emissions can reduce hydroxyl radical and dampen water vapor’s boosting effect.
Specifically, the team finds that if the planet’s average temperatures rise by 2 degrees Celsius, the accompanying rise in water vapor will increase hydroxyl radical levels by about 9 percent. But the corresponding increase in biogenic emissions would in turn bring down hydroxyl radical levels by 6 percent. The final accounting could mean a small boost, of about 3 percent, in the atmosphere’s ability to break down methane and other chemical compounds as the planet warms.
“Hydroxyl radicals are important in determining the lifetime of methane and other reactive greenhouse gases, as well as gases that affect public health, including ozone and certain other air pollutants,” says lead author Qindan Zhu, who led the work as a postdoc in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.
“There’s a whole range of environmental reasons why we want to understand what’s going on with this molecule,” adds MIT’s Arlene Fiore. “We want to make sure it’s around to chemically remove all these gases and pollutants.” Fiore is an adjunct senior research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, which is part of the Columbia Climate School, and formerly a professor in Columbia’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences.
The new study appears in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems (JAMES). The study’s co-authors include Lamont-Doherty’s Robert Pincus, a research professor in ocean and climate physics.
A Natural Neutralizer
The hydroxyl radical, known chemically as OH, is made up of one oxygen atom and one hydrogen atom, along with an unpaired electron. This configuration makes the molecule extremely reactive. Like a chemical vacuum cleaner, OH easily pulls an electron or hydrogen atom away from other molecules, breaking them down into weaker, more water-soluble forms. In this way, OH reduces a vast range of chemicals, including some air pollutants, pathogens, and ozone. And changes in OH are a powerful lever on methane.
“For methane, the reaction with OH is considered the most important loss pathway,” Zhu says. “About 90 percent of the methane that’s removed from the atmosphere is due to the reaction with OH.”
Indeed, it’s thanks to reactions with hydroxyl radical that methane can only stick around in the atmosphere for about a decade—far shorter than carbon dioxide, which can linger for 1,000 years or longer. But even as OH breaks down methane already in the atmosphere, more methane continues to accumulate. Rising methane concentrations, in addition to human-derived emissions of carbon dioxide, are driving global warming, and it’s unclear how OH’s methane-clearing power will keep up.
“The questions we’re exploring here are: What are the main processes that control OH concentrations? And how will OH respond to climate change?” Fiore says.
An Aquaplanet’s Air
For their study, the researchers developed a new model to simulate levels of OH in the atmosphere under a current global climate scenario, compared to a future warmer climate. Their model, dubbed “AquaChem,” is an expansion of a simplified model that is part of a suite of tools developed by the Community Earth System Model (CESM) project. The model that the team chose to build off is one that represents the Earth as a simplified “aquaplanet,” with an entirely ocean-covered surface.
“Idealized problems like the study of aquaplanets are part of how Earth scientists build up understanding, since they let us see the simplest system in which a phenomenon emerges,” says Pincus.
Aquaplanet models allow scientists to study detailed interactions in the atmosphere in response to changes in surface temperatures, without having to also spend computing time and energy on simulating complex dynamics between the land, water, and polar ice caps.
To the aquaplanet model, Zhu added an atmospheric chemistry component that simulates detailed chemical reactions in the atmosphere consistent with the applied surface temperatures. The chemical reactions that she modeled represent those that are known to affect OH concentrations.
OH is primarily produced when ozone interacts with sunlight in the presence of water vapor. For instance, scientists have found that OH levels can vary depending certain anthropogenic and natural emissions, all of which Zhu incorporated separately and together into the AquaChem model in order to isolate the impact of each process on OH.
The emissions in particular include carbon monoxide, methane, nitrogen oxides, and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), some of which are emitted through human practices, and others that are given off by natural processes. One type of naturally-derived VOCs are “biogenic” emissions — gases, such as isoprene, that some plants and trees emit through tiny pores called stomata during transpiration.
Into the AquaChem model, Zhu plugged in data that were available for each type of emissions from the year 2000 — a year that is generally considered to represent the current climate in a simplified form. She set the aquaplanet’s sea surface temperatures to the zonal annual mean of that year, and found that the model accurately reproduced the major sensitivities of OH chemistry to the underlying chemical processing as simulated in a more complex chemistry-climate model.
Then, Zhu ran the model under a second, globally warming scenario. She set the planet’s sea surface temperatures to warm by 2 degrees Celsius (a warming that is likely to occur unless global anthropogenic carbon emissions are mitigated). The team looked at how this warming would affect the various types of emissions and chemical processes, and how these changes would ultimately affect levels of OH in the atmosphere.
In the end, they found the two biggest drivers of OH levels were rising water vapor and biogenic emissions. They found that global warming would increase the amount of water vapor to the atmosphere, which in turn would boost production of OH by 9 percent. However, this same degree of warming would also increase biogenic emissions such as isoprene, which reacts with and breaks down OH, bringing down its levels by 6 percent.
The team recognizes that there are many other factors that affect the response of isoprene emissions to surface warming. Rising CO2, not considered in this study, may dampen this temperature-driven response. Of all the factors that can shift OH levels under global warming, the researchers caution that biogenic emissions are the most uncertain, even though they appear to have a large influence. Going forward, the scientists plan to update AquaChem to continue studying how biogenic emissions, as well as other processes and climate scenarios, could sway OH concentrations.
“We know that changes in atmospheric OH, even of a few percent, can actually matter for interpreting how methane might accumulate in the atmosphere,” Zhu says. “Understanding future trends of OH will allow us to determine future trends of methane.”
The study’s co-authors are Nicole Neumann, George Milly and Clare E. Singer from Lamont-Doherty, Jian Guan and Paolo Giani from MIT, and Brian Medeiros from the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
This work was supported, in part, by Spark Climate Solutions and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Adapted from a press release by Jennifer Chu from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
