Strong local evaporative cooling over land due to atmospheric aerosols

Although this process can, in principle, alter surface evaporation due to the coupling between plant water loss and carbon uptake, with the potential to change the surface temperature, aerosol-climate interactions have been traditionally viewed in light of the radiative effects within the atmosphere.

Here, we develop a modeling framework that combines global atmosphere and land model simulations with a conceptual diagnostic tool to investigate these interactions from a surface energy budget perspective. Aerosols increase the terrestrial evaporative fraction, or the portion of net incoming energy consumed by evaporation, by over 4% globally and as much as similar to 40% regionally. The main mechanism for this is the increase in energy allocation from sensible to latent heat due to global dimming (reduction in global shortwave radiation) and slightly augmented by diffuse radiation fertilization.