Assessing the Influence of COVID‐19 on the Shortwave Radiative Fluxes Over the East Asian Marginal Seas
Abstract
The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID‐19) pandemic led to a widespread reduction in aerosol emissions. Using satellite observations and climate model simulations, we study the underlying mechanisms of the large decreases in solar clear‐sky reflection (3.8 W m⁻² or 7%) and aerosol optical depth (0.16 W m⁻² or 32%) observed over the East Asian Marginal Seas in March 2020. By separating the impacts from meteorology and emissions in the model simulations, we find that about one‐third of the clear‐sky anomalies can be attributed to pandemic‐related emission reductions, and the rest to weather variability and long‐term emission trends. The model is skillful at reproducing the observed interannual variations in solar all‐sky reflection, but no COVID‐19 signal is discerned. The current observational and modeling capabilities will be critical for monitoring, understanding, and predicting the radiative forcing and climate impacts of the ongoing crisis.
Additional Information
© 2020. The Authors. This article has been contributed to by US Government employees and their work is in the public domain in the USA. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Issue Online: 02 February 2021; Version of Record online: 02 February 2021; Accepted manuscript online: 29 December 2020; Manuscript accepted: 23 December 2020; Manuscript revised: 21 December 2020; Manuscript received: 12 November 2020. The authors thank L. Donner and D. Paynter for their helpful comments on an early draft. Z. Shen acknowledges support from the Ronald and Maxine Linde Challenge for Climate Science Fund. C. E. Singer acknowledges support from the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. DGE‐1745301. R. X. Ward. acknowledges fellowship support from the Resnick Sustainability Institute at Caltech. Data Availability Statement: The AQUA/MODIS MYD08 L3 Global 1 Deg. data set was acquired from the Level‐1 and Atmosphere Archive and Distribution System (LAADS) Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC), located in the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland (https://ladsweb.nascom.nasa.gov/). The CERES data were obtained from the NASA Langley Research Center Atmospheric Science Data Center (https://doi.org/10.5067/TERRA-AQUA/CERES/EBAF-TOA_L3B004.1). Primary AM4 simulation results that may be used to produce the plots are available are available online (https://data.caltech.edu/records/1666).Attached Files
Published - 2020GL091699.pdf
Supplemental Material - 2020gl091699-sup-0001-supporting_information_si-s01.docx
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 107358
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20210107-101118570
- Ronald And Maxine Linde Center for Global Environmental Science
- DGE-1745301
- NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
- Resnick Sustainability Institute
- Created
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2021-01-08Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2023-09-08Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Resnick Sustainability Institute, COVID-19