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Quantifying the contributions of anthropogenic and natural forcings to climate changes over arid-semiarid areas during 1946–2005

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Abstract

In this study, the contributions from changes in man-made greenhouse gases (GHG), anthropogenic aerosols (AA), and land use (LU), as well as natural solar and volcanic (NAT) forcing changes, to observed changes in surface air temperature (T) and precipitation (P) over global land, especially over arid-semiarid areas, during 1946–2005 are quantified using observations and climate model simulations from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5). Results show that the anthropogenic (ANT) forcings dominate the ubiquitous surface warming seen in observations and lead to slight increases in precipitation over most land areas, while the NAT forcing leads to small cooling over land. GHG increases are the primary factor responsible for the anthropogenic climate change, while the AA forcing offsets a large part of the GHG-induced warming and P changes. The LU forcing generally contributes little to the T and P changes from 1946 to 2005 over most land areas. Unlike the consistent temperature changes among most model simulations, precipitation changes display a large spread among the models and are incomparable with the observations in spatial distributions and magnitude, mainly due to its large internal variability that varies among individual model runs. Using an optimal fingerprinting method, we find that the observed warming over land during 1946–2005 can be largely attributed to the ANT forcings, and the combination of the ANT and NAT forcings can explain about 85~95% of the observed warming trend over global land as well as over most arid-semiarid regions such as Northern China. However, the anthropogenic influences on precipitation over the past 60 years are generally undetectable over most land areas, including most arid-semiarid regions. This indicates that internal variability is still larger than the forced change for land precipitation.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Dr. Aiguo Dai from the University at Albany-SUNY for his valuable suggestions to improve this manuscript. We thank Prof. Ribes Aurélien from National Centre for Meteorological Research for sharing the program of regularized optimal fingerprinting algorithm. We acknowledge the modeling groups and the CMIP5 projects for making the model data available. This work was supported by grants from the National Basic Research Program of China (2016YFA0600402 and 2012CB956203) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (41675094, 41605066, and 41405090).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CAS Key Laboratory of Regional Climate-Environment for Temperate East Asia, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 10029, China

    Chunxiang Li, Tianbao Zhao & Kairan Ying

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  1. Chunxiang Li
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  2. Tianbao Zhao
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  3. Kairan Ying
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Correspondence to Tianbao Zhao.

Additional information

This article is part of a Special Issue on “Decadal Scale Drought in Arid Regions” edited by Zong-Liang Yang and Zhuguo Ma

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Li, C., Zhao, T. & Ying, K. Quantifying the contributions of anthropogenic and natural forcings to climate changes over arid-semiarid areas during 1946–2005. Climatic Change 144, 505–517 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-017-2028-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-017-2028-7

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