Open AccessAnthropogenic warming of Tibetan Plateau and constrained future projection
Author(s) -
Tianjun Zhou,
Wenxia Zhang
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
environmental research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.37
H-Index - 124
ISSN - 1748-9326
DOI - 10.1088/1748-9326/abede8
Subject(s) - environmental science , plateau (mathematics) , global warming , greenhouse gas , climate change , water cycle , climatology , ecology , geology , mathematical analysis , mathematics , biology
Serving as ‘the water tower of Asia’, the Tibetan Plateau (TP) supplies water resources to more than 1.4 billion people. It is warming more rapidly than the global average over the past decades, affecting regional hydrological cycle and ecosystem services. However, the anthropogenic (ANT) influence remains unknown. Here we assessed the human contribution to the observed TP warming based on coupled climate simulations and an optimal fingerprinting detection and attribution analysis. We show that the observed rapid warming on the TP (1.23 °C over 1961–2005) is attributable to human influence, and particularly, to the greenhouse gases with a contribution of 1.37 °C by the best estimate, which was slightly offset by anthropogenic aerosols. As the multi-model ensemble tends to underestimate the ANT warming trend, the constraint from the attribution results suggests an even warmer future on the TP than previously expected, implying further increased geohazard risks in the Asian water tower.