CyI Research Project to Investigate How Dust and Wildfires Contribute to Regional Climate Warming Featured
A new project led by The Cyprus Institute is exploring how heat-trapping particles, known as absorbing aerosols, released due to air pollution, dust, and wildfires, affect climate warming in the Eastern Mediterranean. This study is crucial for Cyprus and the wider Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East (EMME) region, which has been recognized as a climate change ‘hotspot’, experiencing warming faster than the global average. Project results will help researchers better understand the role and impact of absorbing aerosols in regional warming and inform efforts to address the climate crisis.
Climate change remains one of the most pressing challenges facing our planet. It is driven largely by a process known as “radiative effect” or “forcing”, a disruption to the Earth’s energy balance caused by greenhouse gases and sunlight-absorbing particles, such as black carbon, brown carbon, and mineral dust, released through pollution, dust events, and wildfires.
These challenges are particularly relevant to Cyprus and the wider EMME region, which experiences high levels of desert dust from the Sahara and Middle East, as well as carbon-rich aerosols from seasonal wildfires. Climate models predict that the region will become increasingly arid, causing more frequent wildfires and increasing emissions of absorbing aerosols, intensifying warming in a self-reinforcing cycle. Understanding the role of absorbing aerosols in this process is critical for developing effective climate adaptation strategies.
This is the key objective of ARIADNE, a new project led by the Climate and Atmosphere Research Center (CARE-C) of The Cyprus Institute (CyI) and the National Observatory of Athens (NOA). The project aims to better understand the sources of these aerosols and how their interaction with dust, pollution and wildfires affect atmospheric warming in the region. Through this initiative, which is funded by the Cyprus Research and Innovation Foundation (RIF), researchers will study archived aerosol samples, and new data gathered from the monitoring networks of The Cyprus Institute’s Cyprus Atmospheric Observatory (CAO) in Cyprus, and the Panhellenic Infrastructure for Atmospheric Composition and Climate Change (PANACEA) in Greece.
The ARIADNE project is the first initiative to systematically investigate the role of absorbing aerosols in driving climate change in the region, and as such, represents a vital step towards better understanding and addressing the unique challenges facing Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean.
In fact, this project marks one of several strategic initiatives by CARE-C to strengthen regional climate science and resilience. Indicatively, in addition to better understanding the effects of wildfires in regional climate warming, The Cyprus Institute also actively supports the Cyprus’ Department of Forests with specialized drones for forest monitoring and wildfire prevention and has recently developed Cyprus’s first national tree inventory using AI, a tool that supports sustainable forest management and long-term climate planning.
Contact
For more information you can contact Prof. Nikos Mihalopoulos at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. / This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
