Anthropogenic aerosols mask increases in US rainfall by greenhouse gases

A comprehensive understanding of human-induced changes to rainfall is essential for water resource management and infrastructure design. However, at regional scales, existing detection and attribution studies are rarely able to conclusively identify human influence on precipitation. Here we show tha...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature communications 2024-02, Vol.15 (1), p.1318-15, Article 1318
Main Authors: Risser, Mark D., Collins, William D., Wehner, Michael F., O’Brien, Travis A., Huang, Huanping, Ullrich, Paul A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
704/106/35/823
704/106/694/674
Aerosols
Anthropogenic factors
Climate change
Climate models
Emissions
Environmental impact
ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
Extreme weather
Fossil fuels
GEOSCIENCES
Greenhouse gases
Human influences
Humanities and Social Sciences
multidisciplinary
Precipitation
Rain
Rain gauges
Rainfall
Resource management
Scale effect
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Water resources management
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Summary:A comprehensive understanding of human-induced changes to rainfall is essential for water resource management and infrastructure design. However, at regional scales, existing detection and attribution studies are rarely able to conclusively identify human influence on precipitation. Here we show that anthropogenic aerosol and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are the primary drivers of precipitation change over the United States. GHG emissions increase mean and extreme precipitation from rain gauge measurements across all seasons, while the decadal-scale effect of global aerosol emissions decreases precipitation. Local aerosol emissions further offset GHG increases in the winter and spring but enhance rainfall during the summer and fall. Our results show that the conflicting literature on historical precipitation trends can be explained by offsetting aerosol and greenhouse gas signals. At the scale of the United States, individual climate models reproduce observed changes but cannot confidently determine whether a given anthropogenic agent has increased or decreased rainfall. The authors use rain gauge measurements to derive data-driven estimates of how climate change impacts extreme rain in the US. They find that the expected rainfall increases driven by burning fossil fuels are offset with drying caused by anthropogenic aerosols.
ISSN:2041-1723
2041-1723
DOI:10.1038/s41467-024-45504-8