Resilience of Amazon rainfall to CO2 removal forcing

Abstract

Abstract Over the Amazon region, rainfall-induced changes to CO2 pathways significantly impact humans and multiple ecosystems. Its resilience is of vital importance, and idealized CO2 removal experiments indicate that declining trends in rainfall amounts are irreversible and exhibit a deficiency when the CO2 concentration returns to the pre-industrial level. The irreversible decline in Amazon rainfall is mainly due to the weakened ascent, further led by two main causes. (1) Enhanced tropospheric warming and a wetter atmospheric boundary layer over the tropics during CO2 removal generate a strong meridional gradient of temperature and specific humidity; driven by prevailing northeasterly winds, negative moist enthalpy advection occurs, which in turn weakens the ascent over the Amazon and results in anomalous drought. (2) The enhanced radiative cooling of atmospheric column. Driven by the negative lapse-rate feedback, the outgoing longwave radiative flux increases in the clear-sky atmosphere. As a result, the anomalous diabatic descent generates to maintain the energy balance of the atmospheric column. This result implies that the symmetric removal of CO2 does not guarantee full recovery of regional precipitation.