文章基本信息

标题：Human-caused long-term changes in global aridity
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作者：Rongfan Chai ; Jiafu Mao ; Haishan Chen 等
期刊名称：npj Climate and Atmospheric Science
电子版ISSN：2397-3722
出版年度：2022
卷号：5
期号：1
页码：1-8
DOI：10.1038/s41612-021-00223-5
语种：English
出版社：Nature Publishing Group
摘要：Widespread aridification of the land surface causes substantial environmental challenges and is generally well documented. However, the mechanisms underlying increased aridity remain relatively underexplored. Here, we investigated the anthropogenic and natural factors affecting long-term global aridity changes using multisource observation-based aridity index, factorial simulations from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 6 (CMIP6), and rigorous detection and attribution (D&A) methods. Our study found that anthropogenic forcings, mainly rising greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE) and aerosols, caused the increased aridification of the globe and each hemisphere with high statistical confidence for 1965–2014; the GHGE contributed to drying trends, whereas the aerosol emissions led to wetting tendencies; moreover, the bias-corrected CMIP6 future aridity index based on the scaling factors from optimal D&A demonstrated greater aridification than the original simulations. These findings highlight the dominant role of human effects on increasing aridification at broad spatial scales, implying future reductions in aridity will rely primarily on the GHGE mitigation.