Incorrect Asian aerosols affecting the attribution and projection of regional climate change in CMIP6 models

Anthropogenic aerosol (AA) forcing has been shown as a critical driver of climate change over Asia since the mid-20th century. Here we show that almost all Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) models fail to capture the observed dipole pattern of aerosol optical depth (AOD) trends o...

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Published inNPJ climate and atmospheric science Vol. 4; no. 1; pp. 1 - 8
Main Authors Wang, Zhili, Lin, Lei, Xu, Yangyang, Che, Huizheng, Zhang, Xiaoye, Zhang, Hua, Dong, Wenjie, Wang, Chense, Gui, Ke, Xie, Bing
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London Nature Publishing Group UK 14.01.2021
Nature Publishing Group
Nature Portfolio
Subjects
704/106/694/1108
704/106/694/2786
Aerosols
Anthropogenic factors
Atmospheric Protection/Air Quality Control/Air Pollution
Atmospheric Sciences
Climate change
Climate Change/Climate Change Impacts
Climate models
Climatology
Dipoles
Earth and Environmental Science
Earth Sciences
Emission inventories
Emissions
Human influences
Impact analysis
Optical analysis
Optical thickness
Radiative forcing
Trends
Asia
China
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Summary:Anthropogenic aerosol (AA) forcing has been shown as a critical driver of climate change over Asia since the mid-20th century. Here we show that almost all Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) models fail to capture the observed dipole pattern of aerosol optical depth (AOD) trends over Asia during 2006–2014, last decade of CMIP6 historical simulation, due to an opposite trend over eastern China compared with observations. The incorrect AOD trend over China is attributed to problematic AA emissions adopted by CMIP6. There are obvious differences in simulated regional aerosol radiative forcing and temperature responses over Asia when using two different emissions inventories (one adopted by CMIP6; the other from Peking university, a more trustworthy inventory) to driving a global aerosol-climate model separately. We further show that some widely adopted CMIP6 pathways (after 2015) also significantly underestimate the more recent decline in AA emissions over China. These flaws may bring about errors to the CMIP6-based regional climate attribution over Asia for the last two decades and projection for the next few decades, previously anticipated to inform a wide range of impact analysis.
ISSN:2397-3722
2397-3722
DOI:10.1038/s41612-020-00159-2