Black carbon aerosols impact snowfall over the Tibetan Plateau

Abstract

Snowfall is the primary form of cold-season precipitation over the Tibetan Plateau (TP), crucial for the maintenance of glaciers and snow cover, affecting regional climates and water resources availability. Through an integrative analysis of observations, numerical simulations, and statistical analyses, we found that the spatiotemporal distribution of snowfall across the TP is significantly influenced by black carbon (BC) aerosols from South Asia and the TP. BC affects the snowfall process through multiple mechanisms. Specifically, BC significantly raises atmospheric temperature over the TP, thereby reducing snowfall, particularly in the central TP during autumn, with reductions reaching approximately − 9 mm water equivalent month⁻¹. Moreover, BC enhances cold-season moisture transport from the Bay of Bengal, increasing moisture flux in the southeastern TP and thereby augmenting snowfall in that area by up to 5 mm water equivalent month⁻¹. This study elucidates the complex impact of BC on the spatial–temporal snowfall patterns across the TP and provides important insights into the sustainable development of water resources in the region amid ongoing climate change.

Keywords

Tibetan Plateau / Black carbon / Snowfall / Model simulation / Impact mechanism

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Ye Zhou: Writing – original draft, Visualization, Validation, Software, Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation. Junhua Yang: Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization. Shichang Kang: Writing – review & editing, Funding acquisition. Yuling Hu: Writing – review & editing, Formal analysis. Xintong Chen: Writing – review & editing, Investigation, Conceptualization. Mian Xu: Visualization, Software. Mengmeng Ma: Visualization, Formal analysis.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42071096, 42275045), Foundation from Gansu Provincial Department of Education (2024A-200, 2024QB-054), West Light Foundation of The Chinese Academy of Sciences (xbzg-zdsys-202306), the Science Fund for Creative Research Groups of Gansu Province (Grant No. 23JRRA567), Outstanding Youth Fund of Gansu Province (24JRRA078), and Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research Program (STEP) (2019QZKK0605).

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