The 2024 ACP Paul Crutzen Publication Award
12 May 2025
Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics has named two joint recipients of the 2024 ACP Paul Crutzen Publication Award as well as three short-listed articles. The award was created to recognize an outstanding publication in ACP that advances our understanding of atmospheric chemistry and physics. The annual award was created in honour of Paul Crutzen, Nobel Prize awardee and former director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, who played a pivotal role in the creation of the journal 23 years ago.
This year's recipients for a paper published in 2024 are as follows:
The ACP Letters article by Raghuraman and co-authors addressed the rapid increase in global warming in 2023, which sparked fears that Earth has entered a new warm state. The authors found that the unusual spike in temperatures can be attributed to an El Niño event that year and the occurrence of a La Niña event that immediately preceded it. The implication is that global warming may be continuing at a steady average rate without any dramatic acceleration. Priyam Raghuraman said "climate model simulations have proven to be tremendously useful because they allow us to study the planet's temperature response to internal variability vs. external forcing. In the case of global warming spikes, including the one in 2023, the simulations show that the El Niño–Southern Oscillation is the driver. These spikes will come and go, but attention should stay on the long-term trend in temperature that is anthropogenically forced."
The article by Märkl and co-authors addressed the increasing pressure on the airline industry to reduce net carbon emissions through the use of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). The paper presents timely and fundamental measurement of the very large effect of SAF on cirrus ice crystal number concentrations, with a quantified effect on climate. Such measurements will be highly valuable input to many modelling studies exploring the effect of SAF on climate. The lead author, Raphael Märkl, said that "our exciting flight experiments advance knowledge on the effect of sustainable aviation fuels on contrail formation and provide important input to constrain contrail models that calculate the climate impact. Our results can help to inform industry, policy, and the public on the positive climate effects of SAF and encourage further research on measures to reduce aviation’s climate impact. We are delighted and honoured to receive this award for a unique work that could only be achieved by collaboration among experts from academia including DLR and industry, and we look forward to results of other common projects."
Congratulations also to the authors of three further papers that were short-listed for the award. These articles made important advances in our understanding of long-term reductions in light-absorbing aerosol in the Arctic, secondary ice production in clouds, and ozone deposition to the ocean. These articles are listed on the ACP Paul Crutzen Publication Award web page.
We are grateful to the members of the independent prize committee who selected this year's awardees: Sonia Kreidenweis (chair, Colorado State University), SK Satheesh (Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore), Steve Sherwood (University of New South Wales), John P. Burrows (University of Bremen), Ulrike Lohmann (ETH Zurich), Ilona Riipinen (Stockholm University), and Hiroshi Tanimoto (National Institute for Environmental Studies, Japan).