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Anthropogenic aerosols and the weakening of the South Asian summer monsoon
Yi Ming,Massimo Bollasina,Venkatachalam Ramaswamy +2 more
- pp 3078
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TLDR
This article used a series of climate model experiments to investigate the South Asian monsoon response to natural and anthropogenic forcings, and found that the observed precipitation decrease can be attributed mainly to human-influenced aerosol emissions.Abstract:
Changes in monsoon rainfall are caused by human-produced aerosols slowing the tropical atmospheric circulation. Observations show that South Asia underwent a widespread summertime drying during the second half of the 20th century, but it is unclear whether this trend was due to natural variations or human activities. We used a series of climate model experiments to investigate the South Asian monsoon response to natural and anthropogenic forcings. We find that the observed precipitation decrease can be attributed mainly to human-influenced aerosol emissions. The drying is a robust outcome of a slowdown of the tropical meridional overturning circulation, which compensates for the aerosol-induced energy imbalance between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. These results provide compelling evidence of the prominent role of aerosols in shaping regional climate change over South Asia.read more
Citations
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Book ChapterDOI
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TL;DR: Myhre et al. as discussed by the authors presented the contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2013: Anthropogenic and Natural Radiative forcing.
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References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Bounding the role of black carbon in the climate system: A scientific assessment
Tami C. Bond,Sarah J. Doherty,David W. Fahey,Piers M. Forster,Terje Koren Berntsen,Benjamin DeAngelo,Mark Flanner,Steven J. Ghan,Bernd Kärcher,Dorothy Koch,Stefan Kinne,Yutaka Kondo,Patricia K. Quinn,Marcus C. Sarofim,Martin G. Schultz,Michael Schulz,Chandra Venkataraman,Hua Zhang,Shiqiu Zhang,Nicolas Bellouin,Sarath K. Guttikunda,Philip K. Hopke,Mark Z. Jacobson,Johannes W. Kaiser,Zbigniew Klimont,Ulrike Lohmann,Joshua P. Schwarz,Drew Shindell,Trude Storelvmo,Stephen G. Warren,Charles S. Zender +30 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors provided an assessment of black-carbon climate forcing that is comprehensive in its inclusion of all known and relevant processes and that is quantitative in providing best estimates and uncertainties of the main forcing terms: direct solar absorption; influence on liquid, mixed phase, and ice clouds; and deposition on snow and ice.
Journal ArticleDOI
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Timothy D. Mitchell,Philip Jones +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, a database of monthly climate observations from meteorological stations is constructed and checked for inhomogeneities in the station records using an automated method that refines previous methods by using incomplete and partially overlapping records and by detecting inhomalities with opposite signs in different seasons.
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Isaac M. Held,Brian J. Soden +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined some aspects of the hydrological cycle that are robust across the models, including the decrease in convective mass fluxes, the increase in horizontal moisture transport, the associated enhancement of the pattern of evaporation minus precipitation and its temporal variance, and decrease in the horizontal sensible heat transport in the extratropics.
Book ChapterDOI
Anthropogenic and Natural Radiative Forcing
TL;DR: Myhre et al. as discussed by the authors presented the contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2013: Anthropogenic and Natural Radiative forcing.
Journal ArticleDOI
Monsoons: Processes, predictability, and the prospects for prediction
Peter J. Webster,V. O. Magaña,Tim Palmer,Jagadish Shukla,Robert A. Tomas,M. Yanai,Tetsuzo Yasunari +6 more
TL;DR: In this article, a thorough description of observed monsoon variability and the physical processes that are thought to be important is presented, and some strategies that may help achieve improvement are discussed.
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