Assessing the Roles of Terrestrial Stilling and Solar Dimming in Land Surface Drying/Wetting across China

Abstract

Decreases in wind speed (i.e., terrestrial stilling) and radiation (i.e., solar dimming) have been identified as important causes of aridity change both globally and regionally. To understand how their roles have varied across different natural and socioeconomic circumstances in China, this study presents a nationwide attribution analysis of land surface drying/wetting across the ten first-level river basins. The results suggest that consistent warming and reductions in relative humidity have significantly enhanced atmospheric evaporative demand and driven the land surface to become drier over the past six decades. However, the widespread terrestrial stilling and solar dimming have largely offset such trends by suppressing evaporation. While spatially varying changes in precipitation were the most influential driver of aridity change over half of the 713 used climate sites, decreasing wind speed and radiation were identified as the dominant cause of wetting at 15% and 13% of the sites, respectively. The impacts of terrestrial stilling and solar dimming were generally more prominent in the north (e.g., the Liao River, Songhuajiang, Hai River, and Huai River basins) and south (e.g., the Southeast, Pearl River, and Yangtze River basins) respectively, which could be associated with the weakening monsoon and intensified anthropogenic disturbances such as ecological restoration, urbanization, and air pollution. We conclude that more attention needs to be paid to the independent and combined climatological impacts of global- and regional-level human activities to develop proactive adaptation strategies of water and land management.