Anthropogenic aerosols mask increases in US rainfall by greenhouse gases.
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 38388495.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-024-45504-8 and PMC identifier 10884021.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
A comprehensive understanding of human-induced changes to rainfall is essential for water resource management and infrastructure design. However, at regional scales, existing detection and attribution studies are rarely able to conclusively identify human influence on precipitation. Here we show that anthropogenic aerosol and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are the primary drivers of precipitation change over the United States. GHG emissions increase mean and extreme precipitation from rain gauge measurements across all seasons, while the decadal-scale effect of global aerosol emissions decreases precipitation. Local aerosol emissions further offset GHG increases in the winter and spring but enhance rainfall during the summer and fall. Our results show that the conflicting literature on historical precipitation trends can be explained by offsetting aerosol and greenhouse gas signals. At the scale of the United States, individual climate models reproduce observed changes but cannot confidently determine whether a given anthropogenic agent has increased or decreased rainfall.