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Anthropogenic impact on Earth’s hydrological cycle

Nature Climate Change volume 3, pages 807–810 (2013)Cite this article

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Abstract

The global hydrological cycle is a key component of Earth’s climate system. A significant amount of the energy the Earth receives from the Sun is redistributed around the world by the hydrological cycle in the form of latent heat flux1. Changes in the hydrological cycle have a direct impact on droughts, floods, water resources and ecosystem services. Observed land precipitation2,3,4 and global river discharges5 do not show an increasing trend as might be expected in a warming world6,7,8,9,10,11. Here we show that this apparent discrepancy can be resolved when the effects of tropospheric aerosols are considered. Analysing state-of-the-art climate model simulations, we find for the first time that there was a detectable weakening of the hydrological cycle between the 1950s and the 1980s, attributable to increased anthropogenic aerosols, after which the hydrological cycle recovered as a result of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. The net result of these two counter-acting effects is an insignificant trend in the global hydrological cycle, but the individual influence of each is substantial. Reductions in air pollution have already shown an intensification in the past two decades12,13,14 and a further rapid increase in precipitation could be expected if the current trend continues.

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Figure 1: Observed and modelled mean temperature and precipitation for 1901–2011.
Figure 2: Comparison of precipitation temperature relationships from model simulations with separate forcing factors.
Figure 3: Energy budget analysis of model simulations to show contributions of different physical processes.
Figure 4: Scaling factors and attributable trends from optimal fingerprinting.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Joint DECC/Defra Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme—DECC/Defra (GA01101). We thank C. Senior and G. Martin for helpful comments.

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  1. Met Office Hadley Centre, Exeter EX1 3PB, UK

    Peili Wu, Nikolaos Christidis & Peter Stott

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  1. Peili Wu
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  2. Nikolaos Christidis
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  3. Peter Stott
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Contributions

P.W. organized the research. P.W. and N.C. performed the analysis and wrote the paper. P.S. provided comments and contributed to the text.

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Correspondence to Peili Wu.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Wu, P., Christidis, N. & Stott, P. Anthropogenic impact on Earth’s hydrological cycle. Nature Clim Change 3, 807–810 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1932

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