@article{54e0017a6bff4e969f4227d2f1778ca7,
title = "Uncertainties in solar radiation assessment in the United States using climate models",
abstract = "Solar energy is abundant and offers significant potential for future climate change mitigation. This study investigates the impacts of climate change on surface solar radiation in the United States using a set of climate projections from global and regional climate models (GCMs and RCMs). Multi-model ensemble mean of GCMs in the fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) show a significant increase in annual mean surface solar radiation over the eastern and southern US. The projected solar brightening is consistent among different future periods and pathways. However, RCMs in North American Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (NA-CORDEX) and convection-permitting simulations of the climate of North America exhibit a significant decrease in surface solar radiation over large areas of the US. Those conflicting responses between the GCMs and RCMs are evident throughout the year with the greatest disagreement during fall. When scrutinizing the mechanism of solar radiation changes, we find that cloud behavior alone cannot adequately explain the contrasting changes in solar radiation. Instead, if a climate model considers transient aerosols is the key for solar brightening or dimming. Future solar brightening is mainly associated with the declining aerosols that have been implemented in most of the CMIP5 GCMs. In contrast, solar dimming becomes evident because of the greenhouse gas effects in those GCMs and RCMs without considering the aerosol effects. This study highlights the importance of the aerosol effects in solar energy-related climate assessment, and it is necessary to implement the aerosol forcing in regional climate downscaling.",
keywords = "Aerosols, CMIP5 projections, Convection-permitting WRF, NA-CORDEX, Surface solar radiation",
author = "Liang Chen",
note = "Funding Information: This work was supported by the Illinois State Water Survey, Prairie Research Institute, University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. All views and opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of these institutions. The author would like to thank Dr. D. Kristovich for his valuable comments. The author acknowledges the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin for providing computing resources that have contributed to the research results reported within this paper. The author would like to acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme{\textquoteright}s Working Group on Coupled Modelling, which is responsible for CMIP, and thank the climate modelling groups for producing and making available their model output. For CMIP the US Department of Energy{\textquoteright}s Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison provides coordinating support and led development of software infrastructure in partnership with the Global Organization for Earth System Science Portals. The author gratefully acknowledges the NA-CORDEX climate modeling groups for producing and making available the model output. All the NA-CORDEX data are obtained from the NCAR Climate Data Gateway ( https://www.earthsystemgrid.org/search/cordexsearch.html ). The dataset “High-resolution WRF simulations of the current and future climate of North America” is obtained from the Research Data Archive ( https://rda.ucar.edu/datasets/ds612.0 ) managed by the Data Engineering and Curation Section of the Computational and Information Systems Laboratory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. The author would like to thank the ECMWF for providing the ERA-Interim reanalysis product available from https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/datasets/archive-datasets/reanalysis-datasets/era-interim , and NASA GMAO for providing the MERRA-2 reanalysis product available from https://disc.gsfc.nasa.gov . The author is grateful to the anonymous reviewers whose insightful comments helped improve the manuscript. ",
year = "2020",
doi = "10.1007/s00382-020-05498-7",
language = "English (US)",
journal = "Climate Dynamics",
issn = "0930-7575",
publisher = "Springer Verlag",
}