“The study addresses the impact of wildfires on global climate, and we extensively used the NCAR-Wyoming supercomputer (Cheyenne),” says Shane Murphy, a UW associate professor of atmospheric science. “Also, the paper used observations from UW and other teams around the world to compare to the climate model results. The main conclusion of the work is that wildfire smoke is more cooling than current models assume.”
Murphy was a contributing author of a paper, titled “Biomass Burning Aerosols in Most Climate Models Are Too Absorbing,” that was published Jan. 12 (today) in Nature Communications, an open-access journal that publishes high-quality research from all areas of the natural sciences. Papers published by the journal represent important advances of significance to specialists within each field.
Hunter Brown, who graduated from UW in fall 2020 with a Ph.D. in atmospheric science, was the paper’s lead author. Other contributors to the paper included researchers from Texas A&M University; North Carolina A&T State University; the University of Georgia; the Finnish Meteorological Institute; the Center for International Climate and Environmental Science, and Norwegian Meteorological Institute, both in Oslo, Norway; the University of Reading in the United Kingdom; North-West University in South Africa; the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, China; and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash.
