Identification

Title

Strong local evaporative cooling over land due to atmospheric aerosols

Abstract

Aerosols can enhance terrestrial productivity through increased absorption of solar radiation by the shaded portion of the plant canopy-the diffuse radiation fertilization effect. Although this process can, in principle, alter surface evaporation due to the coupling between plant water loss and carbon uptake, with the potential to change the surface temperature, aerosol-climate interactions have been traditionally viewed in light of the radiative effects within the atmosphere. Here, we develop a modeling framework that combines global atmosphere and land model simulations with a conceptual diagnostic tool to investigate these interactions from a surface energy budget perspective. Aerosols increase the terrestrial evaporative fraction, or the portion of net incoming energy consumed by evaporation, by over 4% globally and as much as similar to 40% regionally. The main mechanism for this is the increase in energy allocation from sensible to latent heat due to global dimming (reduction in global shortwave radiation) and slightly augmented by diffuse radiation fertilization. In regions with moderately dense vegetation (leaf area index >2), the local surface cooling response to aerosols is dominated by this evaporative pathway, not the reduction in incident radiation. Diffuse radiation fertilization alone has a stronger impact on gross primary productivity (+2.18 Pg C y(-1) or +1.8%) than on land evaporation (+0.18 W m(-2) or +0.48%) and surface temperature (-0.01 K). Our results suggest that it is important for land surface models to distinguish between quantity (change in total magnitude) and quality (change in diffuse fraction) of radiative forcing for properly simulating surface climate.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d75x2db6

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2021-05-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Copyright author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata date

2023-08-18T18:30:33.723255

Metadata language

eng; USA