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Aerosol demasking enhances climate warming over South Asia
Anthropogenic aerosols mask the climate warming caused by greenhouse gases (GHGs). In the absence of observational constraints, large uncertainties plague the estimates of this masking effect. Here we used the abrupt reduction in anthropogenic emissions observed during the COVID-19 societal slow-dow...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group UK
2023
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10199435/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37252186 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41612-023-00367-6 |
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author | Nair, H. R. C. R. Budhavant, Krishnakant Manoj, M. R. Andersson, August Satheesh, S. K. Ramanathan, V. Gustafsson, Örjan |
author_facet | Nair, H. R. C. R. Budhavant, Krishnakant Manoj, M. R. Andersson, August Satheesh, S. K. Ramanathan, V. Gustafsson, Örjan |
author_sort | Nair, H. R. C. R. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Anthropogenic aerosols mask the climate warming caused by greenhouse gases (GHGs). In the absence of observational constraints, large uncertainties plague the estimates of this masking effect. Here we used the abrupt reduction in anthropogenic emissions observed during the COVID-19 societal slow-down to characterize the aerosol masking effect over South Asia. During this period, the aerosol loading decreased substantially and our observations reveal that the magnitude of this aerosol demasking corresponds to nearly three-fourths of the CO(2)-induced radiative forcing over South Asia. Concurrent measurements over the northern Indian Ocean unveiled a ~7% increase in the earth’s surface-reaching solar radiation (surface brightening). Aerosol-induced atmospheric solar heating decreased by ~0.4 K d(−1). Our results reveal that under clear sky conditions, anthropogenic emissions over South Asia lead to nearly 1.4 W m(−2) heating at the top of the atmosphere during the period March–May. A complete phase-out of today’s fossil fuel combustion to zero-emission renewables would result in rapid aerosol demasking, while the GHGs linger on. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-10199435 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2023 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group UK |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-101994352023-05-23 Aerosol demasking enhances climate warming over South Asia Nair, H. R. C. R. Budhavant, Krishnakant Manoj, M. R. Andersson, August Satheesh, S. K. Ramanathan, V. Gustafsson, Örjan NPJ Clim Atmos Sci Article Anthropogenic aerosols mask the climate warming caused by greenhouse gases (GHGs). In the absence of observational constraints, large uncertainties plague the estimates of this masking effect. Here we used the abrupt reduction in anthropogenic emissions observed during the COVID-19 societal slow-down to characterize the aerosol masking effect over South Asia. During this period, the aerosol loading decreased substantially and our observations reveal that the magnitude of this aerosol demasking corresponds to nearly three-fourths of the CO(2)-induced radiative forcing over South Asia. Concurrent measurements over the northern Indian Ocean unveiled a ~7% increase in the earth’s surface-reaching solar radiation (surface brightening). Aerosol-induced atmospheric solar heating decreased by ~0.4 K d(−1). Our results reveal that under clear sky conditions, anthropogenic emissions over South Asia lead to nearly 1.4 W m(−2) heating at the top of the atmosphere during the period March–May. A complete phase-out of today’s fossil fuel combustion to zero-emission renewables would result in rapid aerosol demasking, while the GHGs linger on. Nature Publishing Group UK 2023-05-20 2023 /pmc/articles/PMC10199435/ /pubmed/37252186 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41612-023-00367-6 Text en © The Author(s) 2023 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . |
spellingShingle | Article Nair, H. R. C. R. Budhavant, Krishnakant Manoj, M. R. Andersson, August Satheesh, S. K. Ramanathan, V. Gustafsson, Örjan Aerosol demasking enhances climate warming over South Asia |
title | Aerosol demasking enhances climate warming over South Asia |
title_full | Aerosol demasking enhances climate warming over South Asia |
title_fullStr | Aerosol demasking enhances climate warming over South Asia |
title_full_unstemmed | Aerosol demasking enhances climate warming over South Asia |
title_short | Aerosol demasking enhances climate warming over South Asia |
title_sort | aerosol demasking enhances climate warming over south asia |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10199435/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37252186 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41612-023-00367-6 |
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