Incorrect Asian aerosols affecting the attribution and projection of regional climate change in CMIP6 models
- 1State Key Laboratory of Severe Weather and Key Laboratory of Atmospheric Chemistry of CMA, Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences, Beijing, China
- 2Collaborative Innovation Center on Forecast and Evaluation of Meteorological Disasters, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, China
- 3School of Atmospheric Sciences and Key Laboratory of Tropical Atmosphere–Ocean System, Ministry of Education, Sun Yat-sen University and Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory, Zhuhai, China
- 4Department of Atmospheric Sciences, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA
- 5Laboratory for Climate Studies, National Climate Center, China Meteorological Administration, Beijing, China
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.
How to cite: Lin, L., Wang, Z., Xu, Y., Che, H., Zhang, X., Zhang, H., Dong, W., Wang, C., Gui, K., and Xie, B.: Incorrect Asian aerosols affecting the attribution and projection of regional climate change in CMIP6 models , EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-8421, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-8421, 2021.
