Abstract
Prolonged breaks during the Indian summer monsoon (ISM) season can cause a massive deficit in all-India rainfall, leading to drought conditions. The availability of long-term observations from radio occultation (RO) data, with a finer vertical resolution, provides a unique opportunity to explore the thermal anomalies in the upper troposphere (UT) during ISM season. The present work focuses on drought years during the period 2007–2016 using this RO data. Results show significant cold (warm) anomalies in the UT, extending from west-central Asia (20°E) to east-central Asia (160°E) during drought (near-excess) years of ISM with strongest fluctuations near the eastern and western side of the Caspian Sea. Result suggests that these anomalies modulate the north–south thermal contrast over the ISM region on a seasonal scale, impacting the monsoon performance. In 2009, before the occurrence of three break conditions over the ISM domain, three major blocking highs were formed in the UT (~ 10 km) over south-east Asia (30°–40°N, 100°–120°E). During the first dry spell of monsoon in 2009, an extremely cold anomaly (~ 12 K) appeared in the UT near the Caspian Sea, which brought cold dry air to north-west India leading to delayed northward advance of the monsoon. When compared to near-excess years, drought years exhibit substantial intraseasonal temperature fluctuations in the UT over the core monsoon zone, with the strongest variations during the severe drought year 2009. The prolonged second dry spell of 2009 during 26 July–10 August is a manifestation of two subsequent events characterized by upper tropospheric subsidence and warm anomalies advected from the east.
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The data used in the present study are obtained from the following websites: Aura-MLS: https://mls.jpl.nasa.gov/products/h2o_product.php. COSMIC: https://www.cosmic.ucar.edu/what-we-do/cosmic-1/data/. ERA-Interim: http://apps.ecmwf.int/datasets/data/interim-full-moda/levtype=sfc/. IMD Gridded rainfall: https://www.imdpune.gov.in/Clim_Pred_LRF_New/Grided_Data_Download.html. NOAA-OLR: https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.interp_OLR.html.
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Acknowledgements
This study was supported by the ‘Monsoon mission II’ project funded by the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES), Govt. of India. The radio occultation data used in the study is taken from COSMIC Data Analysis and Archive Center (CDAAC/UCAR). We gratefully acknowledge the COSMIC team for the data. The authors would like to acknowledge India Meteorological Department for providing gridded rainfall data, and Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Centre for providing the Aura-MLS water vapour data. Thanks are also due to ECMWF and NOAA-CIRES for providing the ERA-Interim and the gridded OLR data.
Funding
This study was supported by the ‘MONSOON MISSION-II’ project funded by the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES), Govt. of India.
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Suneeth, K.V., Pattanaik, D.R., Das, A.K. et al. Features of upper tropospheric temperature fluctuations during drought years of Indian summer monsoon: results inferred from COSMIC GPS RO observations. Meteorol Atmos Phys 134, 79 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00703-022-00906-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00703-022-00906-5