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Rain‐aerosol relationships influenced by wind speed
Author(s) -
Yang Yang,
Russell Lynn M.,
Lou Sijia,
Liu Ying,
Singh Balwinder,
Ghan Steven J.
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1002/2016gl067770
Subject(s) - wind speed , environmental science , atmospheric sciences , sea salt , meteorology , aerosol , middle latitudes , humidity , precipitation , relative humidity , climatology , geology , geography
Aerosol optical depth (AOD) has been shown to correlate with precipitation rate ( R ) in recent studies. The R ‐AOD relationships over oceans are examined in this study using 150 year simulations with the Community Earth System Model. Through partial correlation analysis, with the influence of 10 m wind speed removed, R ‐AOD relationships exert a change from positive to negative over the midlatitude oceans, indicating that wind speed makes a large contribution to the relationships by changing the sea‐salt emissions. A simulation with prescribed sea‐salt emissions shows that wind speed leads to increasing R by +0.99 mm d −1 averaged globally, offsetting 64% of the wet scavenging‐induced decrease between polluted and clean conditions, defined according to percentiles of AOD. These demonstrate that wind speed is one of the major drivers of R ‐AOD relationships. Relative humidity at 915 hPa can also result in the positive relationships; however, its role is smaller than that of wind speed.