Aerosol forcing regulating recent decadal change of summer water vapor budget over the Tibetan Plateau.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 38472204.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-024-46635-8 and PMC identifier 10933345.
- 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
The Tibetan Plateau (TP), known as the Asian water tower, has been getting wetter since the 1970s. However, the primary drivers behind this phenomenon are still highly controversial. Here, we isolate the impacts of greenhouse gases (GHG), aerosols, natural forcings and internal climate variability on the decadal change of summer water vapor budget (WVB) over the TP using multi-model ensemble simulations. We show that an anomalous Rossby wave train in the upper troposphere travelling eastward from central Europe and equatorward temperature gradient in eastern China due to the inhomogeneous aerosol forcing in Eurasia jointly contribute to anomalous easterly winds over the eastern TP. Such anomalous easterly winds result in a significant decrease in water vapor export from the eastern boundary of the TP and dominate the enhanced summer WVB over the TP during 1979-2014. Our results highlight that spatial variation of aerosol forcing can be used as an important indicator to project future WVB over the TP.