Abstract
AbstractRecord rainfall and severe flooding struck eastern China in the summer of 2020. The extreme summer rainfall occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, which started in China in early 2020 and spread rapidly across the globe. By disrupting human activities, substantial reductions in anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols might have affected regional precipitation in many ways. Here, we investigate such connections and show that the abrupt emissions reductions during the pandemic strengthened the summer atmospheric convection over eastern China, resulting in a positive sea level pressure anomaly over northwestern Pacific Ocean. The latter enhanced moisture convergence to eastern China and further intensified rainfall in that region. Modeling experiments show that the reduction in aerosols had a stronger impact on precipitation than the decrease of greenhouse gases did. We conclude that through abrupt emissions reductions, the COVID-19 pandemic contributed importantly to the 2020 extreme summer rainfall in eastern China.
Funder
National Natural Science Foundation of China
National Key Research and Development Program of China
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Subject
General Physics and Astronomy,General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology,General Chemistry,Multidisciplinary
Reference49 articles.
1. Liu, B., Yan, Y., Zhu, C., Ma, S. & Li, J. Record-breaking Meiyu rainfall around Yangtze River in 2020 regulated by the subseasonal phase transition of North Atlantic Oscillation. Geophys. Res. Lett. 47, e2020GL090342 (2020).
2. Zhou, Z., Xie, S. & Zhang, R. Historic Yangtze flooding of 2020 tied to extreme Indian Ocean conditions. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 118, e2022255118 (2021).
3. Ingram, W. Increases all round. Nat. Clim. Chang. 6, 443–444 (2016).
4. Tabari, H. Climate change impact on flood and extreme precipitation increases with water availability. Sci. Rep. 10, 13768 (2020).
5. Wang, J., Liu, Y., Ding, Y. & Wu, Z. Towards influence of Arabian Sea SST anomalies on the withdrawal date of Meiyu over the Yangtze-Huaihe River basin. Atmos. Res. 249, 105340 (2021).
Cited by
49 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献