Effects of ozone levels on climate through Earth history

Deitrick, Russell; Goldblatt, Colin

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-19-1201-2023

Articles | Volume 19, issue 6

https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-19-1201-2023

© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-19-1201-2023

© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 19, issue 6

Research article

|

20 Jun 2023

Research article |

| 20 Jun 2023

Effects of ozone levels on climate through Earth history

Russell Deitrick and Colin Goldblatt

Data sets

Climate model output for Earth with Pre-Cambrian ozone levels R. Deitrick and C. Goldblatt https://doi.org/10.20383/103.0648

Model code and software

deitrr/DG_Pre-Cambrian_Ozone: Final version (v1.0) R. Deitrick and C. Goldblatt https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7946880

CliMT/climt: Update Github actions runners (v0.17.12) J. Monteiro, J. McGibbon, S. D. Abel, monalivadje, S. Kosukhin, L. Kluft, and D. L. Suhas https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1240966

Short summary

Prior to 2.5 billion years ago, ozone was present in our atmosphere only in trace amounts. To understand how climate has changed in response to ozone build-up, we have run 3-D climate simulations with different amounts of ozone. We find that Earth's surface is about 3 to 4 °C degrees cooler with low ozone. This is caused by cooling of the upper atmosphere, where ozone is a warming agent. Its removal causes the upper atmosphere to become drier, weakening the greenhouse warming by water vapor.