Winter extreme weather events receive major public attention due to their serious impacts¹, but the dominant factors regulating their interdecadal trends have not been clearly established^2,3. Here, we show that the radiative forcing due to geospatially redistributed anthropogenic aerosols mainly determined the spatial variations of winter extreme weather in the Northern Hemisphere during 1970–2005, a unique transition period for global aerosol forcing⁴. Over this period, the local Rossby wave activity and extreme events (top 10% in wave amplitude) exhibited marked declining trends at high latitudes, mainly in northern Eurasia. The combination of long-term observational data and a state-of-the-art climate model revealed the unambiguous signature of anthropogenic aerosols on the wintertime jet stream, planetary wave activity and surface temperature variability on interdecadal timescales. In particular, warming due to aerosol reductions in Europe enhanced the meridional temperature gradient on the jet’s poleward flank and strengthened the zonal wind, resulting in significant suppression in extreme events over northern Eurasia. These results exemplify how aerosol forcing can impact large-scale extratropical atmospheric dynamics, and illustrate the importance of anthropogenic aerosols and their spatiotemporal variability in assessing the drivers of extreme weather in historical and future climate.

冬季极端天气事件因其影响严重而受到公众的广泛关注¹，但调控其年代际趋势的主导因素尚未明确^2,3。在这里，我们表明，地理空间重新分布的人为气溶胶引起的辐射强迫主要决定了 1970-2005 年北半球冬季极端天气的空间变化，这是全球气溶胶强迫的独特过渡时期⁴. 在此期间，局部罗斯贝波活动和极端事件（波幅前 10%）在高纬度地区表现出明显的下降趋势，主要在欧亚大陆北部。长期观测数据和最先进的气候模型相结合，揭示了冬季急流上人为气溶胶的明确特征、行星波活动和年代际时间尺度上的地表温度变化。特别是，欧洲气溶胶减少导致的变暖增强了喷气机极地侧翼的经向温度梯度并加强了纬向风，导致欧亚大陆北部极端事件的显着抑制。这些结果举例说明了气溶胶强迫如何影响大规模的温带大气动力学，