TY - JOUR
T1 - A PDRMIP Multimodel study on the impacts of regional aerosol forcings on global and regional precipitation
AU - Liu, L.
AU - Shawki, D.
AU - Voulgarakis, Apostolos
AU - Kasoar, M.
AU - Samset, B. H.
AU - Myhre, G.
AU - Forster, P. M.
AU - Hodnebrog,
AU - Sillmann, J.
AU - Aalbergsjø, S. G.
AU - Boucher, O.
AU - Faluvegi, G.
AU - Iversen, T.
AU - Kirkevåg, A.
AU - Lamarque, J. F.
AU - Olivié, D.
AU - Richardson, T.
AU - Shindell, D.
AU - Takemura, T.
N1 - Funding Information:
PDRMIP is partly funded through the Norwegian Research Council project NAPEX (Project 229778). L. Liu was supported by the Northwest Institute of Nuclear Technology, Xi'an, China, and by Imperial College London. D. Shawki was supported by the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment. M. Kasoar and A. Voulgarakis were supported by the Natural Environment Research Council under Grant NE/K500872/1. Simulations with HadGEM3-GA4 were performed using the MONSooN system, a collaborative facility supplied under the Joint Weather and Climate Research Programme, which is a strategic partnership between the Met Office and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). D. Shawki and A. Voulgarakis would like to thank Prof. J Srinivasan and Dr. Arindam Chakraborty from IISc Bangalore and the Divecha Centre for Climate Change for discussions on the responses of Asian rainfall to aerosols, and the UK India Education and Research Initiative (UKIERI Grant IND/CONT/E/93-14/697) for supporting the interactions between Imperial College London and IISc Bangalore/the Divecha Centre. T. Takemura was supported by the supercomputer system of the National Institute for Environmental Studies, Japan, the Environment Research and Technology Development Fund (S-12-3) of the Ministry of the Environment, Japan, and JSPS KAKENHI Grants 15H01728 and 15K12190. D. Olivié, A. Kirkevag, and T. Iversen were supported by the Norwegian Research Council through the projects EVA (Grant 229771), EarthClim (207711/E10), NOTUR (nn2345k), and NorStore (ns2345k). We acknowledge the NASA High-End Computing Program through the NASA Center for Climate Simulation at Goddard Space Flight Center for computational resources to run the GISS-E2R model. O. Boucher acknowledges HPC resources from CCRT under the gencmip6 allocation provided by GENCI (Grand Equipement National de Calcul Intensif). T. Richardson and P. Forster were supported by NERC Grants NE/K007483/1 and NE/N006038/1
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 American Meteorological Society.
PY - 2018/6/1
Y1 - 2018/6/1
N2 - Atmospheric aerosols such as sulfate and black carbon (BC) generate inhomogeneous radiative forcing and can affect precipitation in distinct ways compared to greenhouse gases (GHGs). Their regional effects on the atmospheric energy budget and circulation can be important for understanding and predicting global and regional precipitation changes, which act on top of the background GHG-induced hydrological changes. Under the framework of the Precipitation Driver Response Model Intercomparison Project (PDRMIP), multiple models were used for the first time to simulate the influence of regional (Asian and European) sulfate and BC forcing on global and regional precipitation. The results show that, as in the case of global aerosol forcing, the global fast precipitation response to regional aerosol forcing scales with global atmospheric absorption, and the slow precipitation response scales with global surface temperature response. Asian sulfate aerosols appear to be a stronger driver of global temperature and precipitation change compared to European aerosols, but when the responses are normalized by unit radiative forcing or by aerosol burden change, the picture reverses, with European aerosols being more efficient in driving global change. The global apparent hydrological sensitivities of these regional forcing experiments are again consistent with those for corresponding global aerosol forcings found in the literature. However, the regional responses and regional apparent hydrological sensitivities do not align with the corresponding global values. Through a holistic approach involving analysis of the energy budget combined with exploring changes in atmospheric dynamics, we provide a framework for explaining the global and regional precipitation responses to regional aerosol forcing.
AB - Atmospheric aerosols such as sulfate and black carbon (BC) generate inhomogeneous radiative forcing and can affect precipitation in distinct ways compared to greenhouse gases (GHGs). Their regional effects on the atmospheric energy budget and circulation can be important for understanding and predicting global and regional precipitation changes, which act on top of the background GHG-induced hydrological changes. Under the framework of the Precipitation Driver Response Model Intercomparison Project (PDRMIP), multiple models were used for the first time to simulate the influence of regional (Asian and European) sulfate and BC forcing on global and regional precipitation. The results show that, as in the case of global aerosol forcing, the global fast precipitation response to regional aerosol forcing scales with global atmospheric absorption, and the slow precipitation response scales with global surface temperature response. Asian sulfate aerosols appear to be a stronger driver of global temperature and precipitation change compared to European aerosols, but when the responses are normalized by unit radiative forcing or by aerosol burden change, the picture reverses, with European aerosols being more efficient in driving global change. The global apparent hydrological sensitivities of these regional forcing experiments are again consistent with those for corresponding global aerosol forcings found in the literature. However, the regional responses and regional apparent hydrological sensitivities do not align with the corresponding global values. Through a holistic approach involving analysis of the energy budget combined with exploring changes in atmospheric dynamics, we provide a framework for explaining the global and regional precipitation responses to regional aerosol forcing.
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U2 - 10.1175/JCLI-D-17-0439.1
DO - 10.1175/JCLI-D-17-0439.1
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85047101698
SN - 0894-8755
VL - 31
SP - 4429
EP - 4447
JO - Journal of Climate
JF - Journal of Climate
IS - 11
ER -