The DOI matches its Crossref record; 46 of the 46 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Recent Northern Hemisphere tropical expansion primarily driven by black carbon and tropospheric ozone
Open accessAbstract
Observational analyses have shown the width of the tropical belt increasing in recent decades as the world has warmed. This expansion is important because it is associated with shifts in large-scale atmospheric circulation and major climate zones. Although recent studies have attributed tropical expansion in the Southern Hemisphere to ozone depletion, the drivers of Northern Hemisphere expansion are not well known and the expansion has not so far been reproduced by climate models. Here we use a climate model with detailed aerosol physics to show that increases in heterogeneous warming agents—including black carbon aerosols and tropospheric ozone—are noticeably better than greenhouse gases at driving expansion, and can account for the observed summertime maximum in tropical expansion. Mechanistically, atmospheric heating from black carbon and tropospheric ozone has occurred at the mid-latitudes, generating a poleward shift of the tropospheric jet, thereby relocating the main division between tropical and temperate air masses. Although we still underestimate tropical expansion, the true aerosol forcing is poorly known and could also be underestimated. Thus, although the insensitivity of models needs further investigation, black carbon and tropospheric ozone, both of which are strongly influenced by human activities, are the most likely causes of observed Northern Hemisphere tropical expansion.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
The NCEP/NCAR 40-Year Reanalysis Project
Kalnay, E., Kanamitsu, M., Kistler, R., Collins, W., Deaven, D., Gandin, L., Iredell, M., Saha, S., White, G., Woollen, J., et al. (1996) · Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society · doi:10.1175/1520-0477(1996)077<0437:tnyrp>2.0.co;2 · Cited by 28,360
Climate change 2007: the physical science basis
Solomon, S., Qin, D., Manning, M., Marquis, M. C., Averyt, K. B., Tignor, M., Miller, H. L., & Chen, Z. (2007) · Cited by 23,383
Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis.
Schiavon, S., & Zecchin, R. (2007) · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · Cited by 16,994
Statistical Methods in the Atmospheric Sciences
Ramsey, P. H. (1996) · Technometrics · doi:10.1080/00401706.1996.10484553 · Cited by 7,601
Uppala, S. M., KÅllberg, P. W., Simmons, A. J., Andrae, U., Bechtold, V. D. C., Fiorino, M., Gibson, J. K., Haseler, J., Hernandez, A., Kelly, G. A., et al. (2005) · Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society · doi:10.1256/qj.04.176 · Cited by 6,804
NCEP–DOE AMIP-II reanalysis (R-2)
Kanamitsu, M., Ebisuzaki, W., Woollen, J., Yang, S.-K., Hnilo, J. J., Fiorino, M., & Potter, G. L. (2002) · Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society · doi:10.1175/bams-83-11-1631 · Cited by 5,771
Adler, R. F., Huffman, G. J., Chang, A. T. C., Ferraro, R. R., Xie, P., Janowiak, J. E., Rudolf, B., Schneider, U., Curtis, S., Bolvin, D. T., et al. (2003) · Journal of Hydrometeorology · doi:10.1175/1525-7541(2003)004<1147:tvgpcp>2.0.co;2 · Cited by 5,425
The NCEP Climate Forecast System Reanalysis
Saha, S., Moorthi, S., Pan, H.-L., Wu, X., Wang, J., Nadiga, S., Tripp, P., Kistler, R., Woollen, J., Behringer, D., et al. (2010) · Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society · doi:10.1175/2010bams3001.1 · Cited by 5,136
MERRA: NASA’s Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications
Rienecker, M. M., Suarez, M. J., Gelaro, R., Todling, R., Bacmeister, J., Liu, E., Bosilovich, M. G., Schubert, S. D., Takacs, L., Kim, G.-K., et al. (2011) · Journal of Climate · doi:10.1175/jcli-d-11-00015.1 · Cited by 4,852
Cited by
Air Quality and Climate Connections
Fiore, A. M., Naik, V., & Leibensperger, E. M. (2015) · Journal of the Air & Waste Management Association · doi:10.1080/10962247.2015.1040526 · Cited by 537
Southward shift of the northern tropical belt from 1945 to 1980
Brönnimann, S., Fischer, A. M., Rozanov, E., Poli, P., Compo, G. P., & Sardeshmukh, P. D. (2015) · Nature Geoscience · doi:10.1038/ngeo2568 · Cited by 58
Metadata
- Authors
- Allen, R. J., Sherwood, S. C., Norris, J. R., & Zender, C. S.
- Venue
- Nature
- Published
- 2012-05
- Volume
- 485
- Issue
- 7398
- Pages
- 350-354
- ISSN
- 0028-0836 (ISSN-L)
- 1476-4687
- OpenAlex
- W2092224811
- Cited by
- 256
- References
- 46
- FWCI
- 18.25
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Recent Northern Hemisphere tropical expansion primarily driven by black carbon and tropospheric ozone. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1038/nature11097
- The paper
- Allen, R. J., Sherwood, S. C., Norris, J. R., & Zender, C. S. (2012). Recent Northern Hemisphere tropical expansion primarily driven by black carbon and tropospheric ozone. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature11097
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
