Abstract
Considering the importance of black carbon (BC), this study began by comparing the 20th century simulation of South Asian summer climate in IPCC CMIP3, based on the scenario of models with and without BC. Generally, the multi-model mean of the models that include BC reproduced the observed climate relatively better than those that did not. Then, the 21st century South Asian summer precipitation was projected based on the IPCC CMIP3 projection simulations. The projected precipitation in the present approach exhibited a considerable difference from the multimodel ensemble mean (MME) of IPCC AR4 projection simulations, and also from the MME of the models that ignore the effect of BC. In particular, the present projection exhibited a dry anomaly over the central Indian Peninsula, sandwiched between wet conditions on the southern and northern sides of Pakistan and India, rather than homogeneous wet conditions as seen in the MME of IPCC AR4. Thus, the spatial pattern of South Asian summer rainfall in the future may be more complicated than previously thought.
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Acknowledgments
We acknowledge the modeling groups, the PCMDI, and the WCRP’s Working Group on Climate Modeling, for making the WCRP CMIP3 multimodel dataset available. Support of this dataset is provided by the Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy.
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Supported by the National (Key) Basic Research and Development (973) Program of China (2015CB453202 and 2016YFA0601802) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (41421004, 41528502, and 41375085).
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Li, S., Mahmood, R. Projecting South Asian summer precipitation in CMIP3 models: A comparison of the simulations with and without black carbon. J Meteorol Res 31, 196–203 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13351-017-6101-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13351-017-6101-y