Possible effects of climate change on atmospheric corrosion in Australia

Abstract

This paper discusses the possible changes in the climatic parameters of relevance to atmospheric corrosion that may occur from 2030 to 2070 due to climate change. Both general parameters devised by fully coupled ocean–atmosphere climate models and more regional parameters are defined. The overall process of atmospheric corrosion is broken into its constituent processes which, for an island such as Australia, consist of aerosol generation, aerosol transport, aerosol deposition, pollutant retention on surfaces, wetting of polluted surfaces, and the chemistry of moisture films on surfaces. The possible effects of climate change on each of these processes are analysed and discussed, and initial results indicating that each may be affected by climate change. However, as variation in the constituent processes is heavily dependent on parameters that vary significantly across Australia, and the effect of the variations differs for different processes, it is difficult to make a general prediction of the average impact of climate change on corrosion.