Study: Falling Pollution Amplified Europe's Heatwaves

European Heat Wave Driven by Cleaner Air, U.K. Climate Office Study Finds

Clean-air initiatives have reduced the amount of air-born particulates, which act as a sunshade.

Cleaner air may be driving Europe’s increasingly intense heatwaves

Researchers found that the reduction in European sulphate emissions altered temperature patterns between different parts of the Northern Hemisphere.

Britain's scorching heatwaves caused by falling pollution levels, researchers find

Britain’s intense summer heatwaves may be a consequence of cleaner air, as new research suggests decades of falling pollution have allowed more of the Sun to reach the Earth’s surface.The study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, concludes that much of the additional warming across Britain and western Europe since the 1980s is linked to the sharp decline in airborne particles known as aerosols, which previously reflected sunlight back in…

Heatwaves caused by fall in pollution

Temperatures in Europe have warmed twice as much as the rest of the world since the 1980s, figures show, with the continent now 2.3C warmer than it was in...

Accelerated European Summer Warming Driven by Atmospheric Circulation Changes in Response to Aerosol Forcing

In the last decades, summer temperatures over Europe increased more than over other regions, associated with a reduction of particle emissions. In particular, the reduction of sulfate emissions over Europe starting from 1980 is associated with changes in the atmospheric circulation and an additional warming over Europe. Climate models reproduce this behavior, but with a magnitude much smaller than that of observations. If the outputs of the models are corrected to compensate for this underestimation, the increase in European summer temperatures becomes largely predictable. Our results highlight the need to take model error into account to estimate past and future climate change.