Abstract
Changes in land cover and dust emission may significantly influence the Northern Hemisphere land monsoon precipitation (NHLMP), but observations are too short to fully evaluate their impacts. The “Green Sahara” during the mid-Holocene (6,000 years BP) provides an opportunity to unravel these mechanisms. Here we show that during the mid-Holocene, most of the NHLMP changes revealed by proxy data are reproduced by the Earth System model results when the Saharan vegetation cover and dust reduction are taken into consideration. The simulated NHLMP significantly increases by 33.10% under the effect of the Green Sahara. The North African monsoon precipitation increases most significantly. Additionally, the Saharan vegetation (dust reduction under vegetated Sahara) alone remotely intensifies the Asian (North American) monsoon precipitation through large-scale atmospheric circulation changes. These findings imply that future variations in land cover and dust emissions may appreciably influence the NHLMP.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 9870-9879 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| Journal | Geophysical Research Letters |
| Volume | 46 |
| Issue number | 16 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Aug 28 2019 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Funding
We thank two anonymous reviewers and editor for their insightful comments. We thank the climate modelling groups (listed in Table S1) for producing and sharing their model outputs, GPCP for providing the Version 2.3 data set, and every paleoclimate researcher who provides the proxy records (listed in Table S2). This research is jointly supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2016YFA0600401), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41420104002 and 41671197), the Program of Innovative Research Team of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions of China, and the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions (164320H116). W. S acknowledges China Scholarship Council (201706860027) for the financial support. Q. Z. acknowledges support from the Swedish Research Council VR project 2017-04232 “Simulating the green Sahara with an Earth System Model.” The simulations were performed on resources provided by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing at NSC and Cray XC30 HPC systems at ECMWF. F. S. R. P. acknowledges funding from the Swedish Research Council as part of the Joint Programming Initiative on Climate and the Belmont Forum for the project “PAlaeo-Constraints on Monsoon Evolution and Dynamics” and the financial and logistic support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (grant RGPIN-2018-04981). This is publication number 10751 of the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, publication number 1391 of the International Pacific Research Center and publication number 270 of the Earth System Modeling Center. The simulation results are available at https://pan.baidu.com/s/189yOM98SpPfRHKdPLP0p1A (Password: jx5v). We thank two anonymous reviewers and editor for their insightful comments. We thank the climate modelling groups (listed in Table S1 ) for producing and sharing their model outputs, GPCP for providing the Version 2.3 data set, and every paleoclimate researcher who provides the proxy records (listed in Table S2 ). This research is jointly supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2016YFA0600401), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41420104002 and 41671197), the Program of Innovative Research Team of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions of China, and the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions (164320H116). W. S acknowledges China Scholarship Council (201706860027) for the financial support. Q. Z. acknowledges support from the Swedish Research Council VR project 2017‐04232 “Simulating the green Sahara with an Earth System Model.” The simulations were performed on resources provided by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing at NSC and Cray XC30 HPC systems at ECMWF. F. S. R. P. acknowledges funding from the Swedish Research Council as part of the Joint Programming Initiative on Climate and the Belmont Forum for the project “PAlaeo‐Constraints on Monsoon Evolution and Dynamics” and the financial and logistic support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (grant RGPIN‐2018‐04981). This is publication number 10751 of the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, publication number 1391 of the International Pacific Research Center and publication number 270 of the Earth System Modeling Center. The simulation results are available at https://pan.baidu.com/s/189yOM98SpPfRHKdPLP0p1A (Password: jx5v).
Keywords
- dust reduction
- Earth System model
- mid-Holocene
- Northern Hemisphere land monsoon precipitation
- Saharan vegetation