Fadnavis, S, Sabin, TP, Roy, C et al. (4 more authors) (2019) Elevated aerosol layer over South Asia worsens the Indian droughts. Scientific reports, 9 (1). p. 10268.
Abstract
Droughts have become more severe and recurrent over the Indian sub-continent during the second half of the twentieth century, leading to more severe hydro-climatic and socio-economic impacts over one of the most densely populated parts of the world. So far, droughts have mostly been connected to circulation changes concomitant with the abnormal warming over the Pacific Ocean, prevalently known as "El Niño". Here, exploiting observational data sets and a series of dedicated sensitivity experiments, we show that the severity of droughts during El Niño is amplified (17%) by changes in aerosols. The model experiments simulate the transport of boundary layer aerosols from South Asian countries to higher altitudes (12-18 km) where they form the Asian Tropopause Aerosol Layer (ATAL) (~ 60-120°E, 20-40°N). During El Niño, the anomalous overturning circulation from the East Asian region further enriches the thickness of aerosol layers in the ATAL over the northern part of South Asia. The anomalous aerosol loading in the ATAL reduces insolation over the monsoon region, thereby exacerbating the severity of drought by further weakening the monsoon circulation. Future increases in industrial emissions from both East and South Asia will lead to a wider and thicker elevated aerosol layer in the upper troposphere, potentially amplifying the severity of droughts.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2019. 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/. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Earth and Environment (Leeds) > Inst for Climate & Atmos Science (ICAS) (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 23 Jul 2019 11:16 |
Last Modified: | 23 Jul 2019 11:16 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Nature Research |
Identification Number: | 10.1038/s41598-019-46704-9 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:148849 |