Impact of Greenhouse Gases and Anthropogenic Aerosols on Regional Precipitation within the CMIP6 Ensemble

Abstract:

Greenhouse gases and anthropogenic aerosols are two major anthropogenic drivers of climate change. In particular, both GHG and aerosols have great impact on the hydrological cycle by changing the formation of cloud dynamically and microphysically. One of the MIPs of CMIP6, DAMIP, provides GHG-forcing-only and anthropogenic-aerosol-forcing-only historical simulations, namely hist-GHG and hist-aer respectively. In this study, by comparing the precipitation trends of historical, hist-GHG and hist-aer simulations with that derived from satellites, rain gauge and reanalysis datasets globally and regionally, we evaluate the ability of CMIP6 models in simulating precipitation change, and semi-quantitatively calculate the contribution of GHG and anthropogenic aerosols on precipitation change respectively during the recent past.