NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

The Himalayas have a profound effect on the South Asian climate and the regional hydrological cycle, as it forms a barrier for the strong monsoon winds and serves as an elevated heat source, thus controlling the onset and distribution of precipitation during the Indian summer monsoon. Recent studies have suggested that radiative heating by absorbing aerosols, such as dust and black carbon over the Indo‐Gangetic Plains (IGP) and slopes of the Himalayas, may significantly accelerate the seasonal warming of the Hindu Kush–Himalayas–Tibetan Plateau (HKHT) and influence the subsequent evolution of the summer monsoon. This paper presents a detailed characterization of aerosols over the IGP and their radiative effects during the premonsoon season (April‐May‐June) when dust transport constitutes the bulk of the regional aerosol loading, using ground radiometric and spaceborne observations. During the dust‐laden period, there is a strong response of surface shortwave flux to aerosol absorption indicated by the diurnally averaged forcing efficiency of −70 Wm−2 per unit optical depth. The simulated aerosol single‐scattering albedo, constrained by surface flux and aerosol measurements, is estimated to be 0.89 ± 0.01 (at ∼550 nm) with diurnal mean surface and top‐of‐atmosphere forcing values ranging from −11 to −79.8 Wm−2 and +1.4 to +12 Wm−2, respectively, for the premonsoon period. The model‐simulated solar heating rate profile peaks in the lower troposphere with enhanced heating penetrating into the middle troposphere (5–6 km), caused by vertically extended aerosols over the IGP with peak altitude of ∼5 km as indicated by spaceborne Cloud‐Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization observations. On a long‐term climate scale, our analysis, on the basis of microwave satellite measurements of tropospheric temperatures from 1979 to 2007, indicates accelerated annual mean warming rates found over the Himalayan–Hindu Kush region (0.21°C/decade ± 0.08°C/decade) and underscores the potential role of enhanced aerosol solar absorption in the maximum warming localized over the western Himalayas (0.26°C/decade ± 0.09°C/decade) that significantly exceed the entire HKHT and global warming rates. We believe the accelerated warming rates reported here are critical to both the South Asian summer monsoon and hydro‐glaciological resource variability in the Himalayan–Hindu Kush snowpack and therefore to the densely populated downstream regions.