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| Titel |
Are anthropogenic aerosols affecting rainfall? |
| VerfasserIn |
Wolfgang Junkermann, Jörg Hacker |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2013
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 15 (2013) |
| Datensatznummer |
250080958
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| Zusammenfassung |
| Modification of cloud microphysics by anthropogenic aerosols is well known since several decades. Whether the underlying processes leads to changes in precipitation is by far less confirmed. Several different factors affect the production of rain in a way that a causality between increasing aerosol load in the atmosphere and a change of annual rainfall is very difficult to confirm. What would be expected as an effect of additional cloud condensation nuclei is a shift in the spatial and temporal rainfall distribution towards a lower number of days with low rain intensity and more frequent or more vigorous single events. In fact such a shift has been observed in several locations worldwide and has been suggested to be caused by increasing aerosol load, however, without further specification of the nature and number of the aerosols involved. Measurements of aerosols which might be important for cloud properties are extremely sparse and no long term monitoring data sets are available up to now.
The problem of missing long term aerosol data that could be compared to available long term meteorological data sets can possibly be resolved in certain areas where well characterized large anthropogenic aerosol sources were installed in otherwise pristine areas without significant changes in land use over several decades. We investigated aerosol sources and current aerosol number, size and spatial distributions with airborne measurements in the planetary boundary layer over two regions in Australia that are reported to suffer from extensive drought despite the fact that local to regional scale water vapor in the atmosphere is slowly and constantly increasing. Such an increase of the total water in the planetary boundary layer would imply also an increase in annual precipitation as observed in many other locations elsewhere. The observed decline of rainfall in these areas thus requires a local to regional scale physical process modifying cloud properties in a way that rain production is delayed. We observed enhanced numbers of anthropogenic ultrafine particles and cloud condensation nuclei and are able to reconstruct also their historical development. The derived aerosol trends are well in agreement with the observed negative trends in precipitation based on the assumption that additional CCN in a first step delay the production of raindrops allowing more efficient horizontal transport to redistribute rainfall, in these cases leading to a regional loss of total rainfall. |
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