Systematic Regional Aerosol Perturbations (SyRAP) in Asia using the intermediate-resolution global climate model FORTE2

Abstract

Emissions of anthropogenic aerosols are rapidly changing, in amounts, composition and geographical distribution. In East and South Asia in particular, strong aerosol trends combined with high population densities imply high potential vulnerability to climate change. Improved knowledge of how near-term climate and weather influences these changes is urgently needed, to allow for better-informed adaptation strategies. To understand and decompose the local and remote climate impacts of regional aerosol emission changes, we perform a set of Systematic Regional Aerosol Perturbations (SyRAP) using the reduced-complexity climate model FORTE 2. Absorbing and scattering aerosols are perturbed separately, over East Asia and South Asia, to assess their distinct influences on climate. In this paper, we first present an updated version of FORTE2, which includes treatment of aerosol-cloud interactions. We then document and validate the local responses over a range of parameters, showing for instance that removing emissions of absorbing aerosols over both East Asia and South Asia is projected to cause a local drying, alongside a range of more widespread effects. We find that SyRAP-FORTE2 is able to reproduce the responses to Asian aerosol changes documented in the literature, and that it can help us decompose regional climate impacts of aerosols from the two regions. Finally, we show how SyRAP-FORTE2 has regionally linear responses in temperature and precipitation and can be used as input to emulators and tunable simple climate models, and as a ready-made tool for projecting the local and remote effects of near-term changes in Asian aerosol emissions.