IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/nat/natcli/v10y2020i3d10.1038_s41558-020-0693-4.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Reduced European aerosol emissions suppress winter extremes over northern Eurasia

Author

Listed:
  • Yuan Wang

    (California Institute of Technology
    California Institute of Technology)

  • Tianhao Le

    (California Institute of Technology)

  • Gang Chen

    (University of California)

  • Yuk L. Yung

    (California Institute of Technology
    California Institute of Technology)

  • Hui Su

    (California Institute of Technology)

  • John H. Seinfeld

    (California Institute of Technology)

  • Jonathan H. Jiang

    (California Institute of Technology)

Abstract

Winter extreme weather events receive major public attention due to their serious impacts1, but the dominant factors regulating their interdecadal trends have not been clearly established2,3. Here, we show that the radiative forcing due to geospatially redistributed anthropogenic aerosols mainly determined the spatial variations of winter extreme weather in the Northern Hemisphere during 1970–2005, a unique transition period for global aerosol forcing4. Over this period, the local Rossby wave activity and extreme events (top 10% in wave amplitude) exhibited marked declining trends at high latitudes, mainly in northern Eurasia. The combination of long-term observational data and a state-of-the-art climate model revealed the unambiguous signature of anthropogenic aerosols on the wintertime jet stream, planetary wave activity and surface temperature variability on interdecadal timescales. In particular, warming due to aerosol reductions in Europe enhanced the meridional temperature gradient on the jet’s poleward flank and strengthened the zonal wind, resulting in significant suppression in extreme events over northern Eurasia. These results exemplify how aerosol forcing can impact large-scale extratropical atmospheric dynamics, and illustrate the importance of anthropogenic aerosols and their spatiotemporal variability in assessing the drivers of extreme weather in historical and future climate.

Suggested Citation

  • Yuan Wang & Tianhao Le & Gang Chen & Yuk L. Yung & Hui Su & John H. Seinfeld & Jonathan H. Jiang, 2020. "Reduced European aerosol emissions suppress winter extremes over northern Eurasia," Nature Climate Change, Nature, vol. 10(3), pages 225-230, March.
  • Handle: RePEc:nat:natcli:v:10:y:2020:i:3:d:10.1038_s41558-020-0693-4
    DOI: 10.1038/s41558-020-0693-4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-0693-4
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1038/s41558-020-0693-4?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Buwen Dong & Rowan T. Sutton & Len Shaffrey & Ben Harvey, 2022. "Recent decadal weakening of the summer Eurasian westerly jet attributable to anthropogenic aerosol emissions," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 13(1), pages 1-10, December.
    2. Ziqian Zhong & Bin He & Hans W. Chen & Deliang Chen & Tianjun Zhou & Wenjie Dong & Cunde Xiao & Shang-ping Xie & Xiangzhou Song & Lanlan Guo & Ruiqiang Ding & Lixia Zhang & Ling Huang & Wenping Yuan &, 2023. "Reversed asymmetric warming of sub-diurnal temperature over land during recent decades," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 14(1), pages 1-10, December.
    3. Zhili Wang & Yadong Lei & Huizheng Che & Bo Wu & Xiaoye Zhang, 2024. "Aerosol forcing regulating recent decadal change of summer water vapor budget over the Tibetan Plateau," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 15(1), pages 1-9, December.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nat:natcli:v:10:y:2020:i:3:d:10.1038_s41558-020-0693-4. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.nature.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.