Impact of Arctic amplification on declining spring dust events in East Asia

Dust aerosols play key roles in affecting regional and global climate through their direct, indirect, and semi-direct effects. Dust events have decreased rapidly since the 1980s in East Asia, particularly over northern China, primarily because of changes in meteorological parameters (e.g. surface wind speed and precipitation). In this study, we found that winter (December–January–February) Arctic amplification associated with weakened temperature gradients along with decreased zonal winds is primarily responsible for the large decline in following spring (March–April–May) dust event occurrences over northern China since the mid-1980s. A dust index was developed for northern China by combining the daily frequency of three types of dust event (dust storm, blowing dust, and floating dust). Using the empirical orthogonal function (EOF) analysis, the first pattern of dust events was obtained for spring dust index anomalies, which accounts for 56.2% of the variability during 1961–2014. Moreover, the enhanced Arctic amplification and stronger Northern Hemisphere annular mode (NAM) in winter can result in the anticyclonic anomalies over Siberia and Mongolia, while cyclonic anomalies over East Europe in spring. These results are significantly correlated with the weakened temperature gradients, increased precipitation and soil moisture, and decreased snow cover extent in the mid-latitude over Northern Hemisphere. Based on the future predictions obtained from the Fifth Climate Models Intercomparison Project (CMIP5), we found that the dust event occurrences may continually decrease over northern China due to the enhanced Arctic amplification in future climate.