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Atmospheric Tracers and the Monsoon System: Lessons Learnt from the 1991 Kuwait Oil Well Fires

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Chaos, Complexity and Leadership 2012

Part of the book series: Springer Proceedings in Complexity ((SPCOM))

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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Acknowledgements

This report refers to studies conducted (from time to time) over more than two decades and has recourse to results obtained with the indirect help of many authors. Detailed descriptions of the methods used, namely SSA (Vautard and Ghil, 1989), WT (Torrence and Compo, 1998) and MP (Mallat and Zhang, 1993), were especially important for own code developments. Graphics tools XvGr (Turner, 1992) and GraDS (Doty, 1992) have extensively been used and are referred to with due respect and gratitude. Invaluable data sources as cited are gratefully acknowledged, but a generous support has to be mentioned with special thanks: To enable direct comparison and to avoid mistakes due to their reconstruction from published PostScript figures, Ed Dlugokencky once provided the time series of deseasonalized CH4 and CO2 growth rates as obtained by the Carbon Cycle Group of the NOAA Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics Laboratory.

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    Peter Carl

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    Santo Banerjee

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    Şefika Şule Erçetin

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Carl, P. (2014). Atmospheric Tracers and the Monsoon System: Lessons Learnt from the 1991 Kuwait Oil Well Fires. In: Banerjee, S., Erçetin, Ş. (eds) Chaos, Complexity and Leadership 2012. Springer Proceedings in Complexity. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7362-2_47

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