Abstract
There is a possibility that severe climate perturbations would follow a major nuclear war (the ‘nuclear winter’) due to the injection of large amounts of smoke into the atmosphere1–6. Given assumptions about the amount of smoke generated, its carbon content, the size of the particles and their optical properties, calculations of the subsequent cooling of the surface air temperatures have been made with a variety of atmospheric models. It has not been possible in these models, however, to represent any effects due to the initially patchy nature of the smoke. We investigate here whether such effects could be important by using a 15-km resolution atmospheric model to simulate the mesoscale response to a single smoke plume. Our results show that vertical circulations created by the radiative heating of the smoke may be sufficiently intense to lead to cloud formation and hence to scavenging of the smoke.
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Golding, B., Goldsmith, P., Machin, N. et al. Importance of local mesoscale factors in any assessment of nuclear winter. Nature 319, 301–303 (1986). https://doi.org/10.1038/319301a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/319301a0
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