| Abstract: | Carbon dioxide(CO_2) is an important greenhouse gas that influences regional climate through disturbing the earth's energy balance. The CO_2 concentrations are usually prescribed homogenously in most climate models and the spatiotemporal variations of CO_2 are neglected. To address this issue,a regional climate model(RegCM4) is modified to investigate the non-homogeneous distribution of CO_2 and its effects on regional longwave radiation flux and temperature in East Asia. One-year simulation is performed with prescribed surface CO_2 fluxes that include fossil fuel emission, biomass burning, air-sea exchange, and terrestrial biosphere flux. Two numerical experiments(one using constant prescribed CO_2 concentrations in the radiation scheme and the other using the simulated CO_2 concentrations that are spatially non-homogeneous) are conducted to assess the impact of non-homogeneous CO_2 on the regional longwave radiation flux and temperature. Comparison of CO_2 concentrations from the model with the observations from the GLOBALVIEW-CO_2 network suggests that the model can well capture the spatiotemporal patterns of CO_2 concentrations. Generally, high CO_2 mixing ratios appear in the heavily industrialized eastern China in cold seasons, which probably relates to intensive human activities. The accommodation of non-homogeneous CO_2 concentrations in the radiative transfer scheme leads to an annual mean change of -0.12 W m~(-2) in total sky surface upward longwave flux in East Asia. The experiment with non-homogeneous CO_2 tends to yield a warmer lower troposphere.Surface temperature exhibits a maximum difference in summertime, ranging from -4.18 K to 3.88 K, when compared to its homogeneous counterpart. Our results indicate that the spatial and temporal distributions of CO_2 have a considerable impact on regional longwave radiation flux and temperature, and should be taken into account in future climate modeling. |
