Can Climate Models Reproduce the Decadal Change of Dust Aerosol in East Asia?

Abstract

Dust aerosol plays an important role in the Earth System. As a natural aerosol, dust aerosol is often calculated interactively in global climate models and temporal variations of dust emission in the past century are far less constrained compared to those of anthropogenic aerosol emissions. Here we evaluate dust emission in East Asia simulated by 15 climate models participating in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5. The results show that none of the models can reproduce the observed decline of dust event frequency during 1961–2005 over East Asia. The models tend to simulate either much less decline or even increase of dust emission. The discrepancy is mainly ascribed to weaker or opposite trends of surface wind speeds and precipitation in the models. These results cast a doubt on the interpretation of long-term variations of dust-affected fields in climate models and highlight the need for further improvements of the models.