Climate sensitivity to ozone and its relevance on the habitability of Earth-like planets

Abstract

Atmospheric ozone plays an important role on the temperature structure of the atmosphere. However, it has not been included in previous studies on the effect of an increasing solar radiation on the Earth's climate. Here we study the climate sensitivity to the presence/absence of ozone with an increasing solar forcing for the first time with a global climate model. We show that the warming effect of ozone increases both the humidity of the lower atmosphere and the surface temperature. Under the same solar irradiance, the mean surface temperature is 7 K higher than in an analog planet without ozone. Therefore, the moist greenhouse threshold, the state at which water vapor becomes abundant in the stratosphere, is reached at a lower solar irradiance (1572 Wm^-2 with respect to 1647 Wm^-2 in the case without ozone). Our results imply that ozone reduces the maximum solar irradiance at which Earth-like planets would remain habitable.

14 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in Icarus

References in corpus (5)

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• Abiotic Ozone and Oxygen in Atmospheres Similar to Prebiotic Earth
• The Habitable Zones of Pre-Main-Sequence Stars
• Transition to a Moist Greenhouse with CO${}_2$ and solar forcing
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Cited by in corpus (3)

• Atmospheric convection plays a key role in the climate of tidally-locked terrestrial exoplanets: insights from high-resolution simulations
• Evaluating the Plausible Range of N2O Biosignatures on Exo-Earths: An Integrated Biogeochemical, Photochemical, and Spectral Modeling Approach
• 3-D climate simulations for the detectability of Proxima Centauri b