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Science 18 October 1985:
Vol. 230. no. 4723, pp. 317 - 319
DOI: 10.1126/science.230.4723.317
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Articles

Influence of Solar Heating and Precipitation Scavenging on the Simulated Lifetime of Post—Nuclear War Smoke

ROBERT C. MALONE 1, LAWRENCE H. AUER 1, GARY A. GLATZMAIER 1, MICHAEL C. WOOD 1, and OWEN B. TOON 2

1 Earth and Space Sciences Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545
2 Space Science Division, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California 94035

The behavior of smoke injected into the atmosphere by massive fires that might follow a nuclear war was simulated. Studies with a three-dimensional global atmospheric circulation model showed that heating of the smoke by sunlight would be important and might produce several effects that would decrease the efficiency with which precipitation removes smoke from the atmosphere. The heating gives rise to vertical motions that carry smoke well above the original injection height. Heating of the smoke also causes the tropopause, which is initially above the smoke, to reform below the heated smoke layer. Smoke above the tropopause is physically isolated from precipitation below. Consequently, the atmospheric residence time of the remaining smoke is greatly increased over the prescribed residence times used in previous models of nuclear winter.

Submitted on June 3, 1985
Accepted on July 30, 1985


THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
Climate and smoke: an appraisal of nuclear winter.
R. Turco, O. Toon, T. Ackerman, J. Pollack, and C Sagan (1990)
Science 247, 166-176
   Abstract »    PDF »
Applied climatology.
L. F. Musk (1986)
Progress in Physical Geography 10, 563-575
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