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On the origin and destination of atmospheric moisture and air mass over the Tibetan Plateau

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Abstract

The Tibet Plateau (TP) is a key region that imposes profound impacts on the atmospheric water cycle and energy budget of Asia, even the global climate. In this work, we develop a climatology of origin (destination) of air mass and moisture transported to (from) the TP using a Lagrangian moisture diagnosis combined with the forward and backward atmospheric tracking schemes. The climatology is derived from 6-h particle positions based on 5-year (2005–2009) seasonal summer trajectory dataset from the Lagrangian particle dispersion model FLEXPART using NCEP/GFS data as input, where the regional model atmosphere was globally filled with particles. The results show that (1) the dominant origin of the moisture supplied to the TP is a narrow tropical–subtropical band in the extended Arabian Sea covering a long distance from the Indian subcontinent to the Southern Hemisphere. Two additional moisture sources are located in the northwestern part of TP and the Bay of Bengal and play a secondary role. This result indicates that the moisture transporting to the TP more depends on the Indian summer monsoon controlled by large-scale circulation. (2) The moisture departing from the TP can be transported rapidly to East Asia, including East China, Korea, Japan, and even East Pacific. The qualitative similarity between the regions of diagnosed moisture loss and the pattern of the observed precipitation highlights the robustness of the role of the TP on precipitation over East Asia. (3) In contrast to the moisture origin confined in the low level, the origin and fate of whole column air mass over the TP is largely controlled by a strong high-level Asian anticyclone. The results show that the TP is a crossroad of air mass where air enters mainly from the northwest and northeast and continues in two separate streams: one goes southwestwards over the Indian Ocean and the other southeastwards through western North Pacific. Both of them partly enter the trade wind zone, which manifests the influence of the air mass transport over the TP on the budget of global atmosphere compositions.

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Acknowledgments

This research was jointly funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant nos. 41105027, 41130960), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (grant no. 20110490488), and the social commonweal profession research program of Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China (GYHY201006009).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Severe Weather, Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences, Beijing, 100081, People’s Republic of China

    Bin Chen & Xiang-De Xu

  2. Laboratory of Cloud-Precipitation Physics and Severe Storms (LACS), Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100029, People’s Republic of China

    Shuai Yang

  3. Department of Geography and Resource Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong, 999077, China

    Wei Zhang

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  1. Bin Chen
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  2. Xiang-De Xu
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Correspondence to Bin Chen.

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Chen, B., Xu, XD., Yang, S. et al. On the origin and destination of atmospheric moisture and air mass over the Tibetan Plateau. Theor Appl Climatol 110, 423–435 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-012-0641-y

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