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European Geosciences Union, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, 9(11), p. 4547-4556, 2011

DOI: 10.5194/acp-11-4547-2011

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Influence of Galactic Cosmic Rays on atmospheric composition and dynamics

Journal article published in 2011 by M. Calisto, I. Usoskin ORCID, E. Rozanov, T. Peter
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Abstract

This study investigates the influence of the Galac-tic Cosmic Rays (GCRs) on the atmospheric composition, temperature and dynamics by means of the 3-D Chemistry Climate Model (CCM) SOCOL v2.0. Ionization rates were parameterized according to CRAC:CRII (Cosmic Ray in-duced Cascade: Application for Cosmic Ray Induced Ion-ization), a detailed state-of-the-art model describing the ef-fects of GCRs in the entire altitude range of the CCM from 0–80 km. We find statistically significant effects of GCRs on tropospheric and stratospheric NO x , HO x , ozone, tempera-ture and zonal wind, whereas NO x , HO x and ozone are an-nually averaged and the temperature and the zonal wind are monthly averaged. In the Southern Hemisphere, the model suggests the GCR-induced NO x increase to exceed 10 % in the tropopause region (peaking with 20 % at the pole), whereas HO x is showing a decrease of about 3 % caused by enhanced conversion into HNO 3 . As a consequence, ozone is increasing by up to 3 % in the relatively unpolluted southern troposphere, where its production is sensitive to additional NO x from GCRs. Conversely, in the northern polar lower stratosphere, GCRs are found to decrease O 3 by up to 3 %, caused by the additional heterogeneous chlorine activation via ClONO 2 + HCl following GCR-induced production of ClONO 2 . There is an apparent GCR-induced acceleration of the zonal wind of up to 5 m s −1 in the Northern Hemisphere below 40 km in February, and a deceleration at higher alti-tudes with peak values of 3 m s −1 around 70 km altitude. The model also indentifies GCR-induced changes in the surface air, with warming in the eastern part of Europe and in Rus-sia (up to 2.25 K for March values) and cooling in Siberia Correspondence to: M. Calisto (marco.calisto@env.ethz.ch) and Greenland (by almost 2 K). We show that these surface temperature changes develop even when the GCR-induced ionization is taken into account only above 18 km, suggest-ing that the stratospherically driven strengthening of the po-lar night jet extends all the way down to the Earth's surface.