Atmospheric tracers and the monsoon system: Lessons learnt from the 1991 Kuwait oil well fires

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Abstract

The smoke veil over the Arabian peninsula, the Arabian Sea and adjacent areas, fed by the burning Kuwaiti oil fields from February to October 1991, turned out to provide a key climate sensitivity ‘experiment’ on the global hydrological response to anthropogenic immissions. Though the menace of setting the oil wells alight failed to work as a deterrent and the Earth’s climate did not respond with a “nuclear winter” type ‘retaliatory strike’, the system was hit at a sensitive spot. Inherent climate variability notwithstanding, the 1991 boreal summer took an exceptional turn. Effects of the disturbance were blurred by spectacular evolutions in the atmospheric methane load, the fundamental economic transformation of that time, and the largest volcano eruption of the century, Mt.;Pinatubo. The challenging mix of political, economic, geophysical and environmental dynamics and events forms the background of the combined data analysis and climate modelling approach presented which aims to rather disentangle the complex issue. The study comprises worldwide oil and gas production as economic proxies, global trace gas loads and growth rates (CH4, CO2), Kuwait fire source strengths and scenario estimation, and related climate model experiments—which lately led to the conception of low-dimensional organization of the monsoon system. Retrospective and prospective conclusions are offered.

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Carl, P. (2014). Atmospheric tracers and the monsoon system: Lessons learnt from the 1991 Kuwait oil well fires. In Springer Proceedings in Complexity (pp. 371–410). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7362-2_47

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