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Impact of tropical cyclone development on the instability of South Asian High and the summer monsoon onset over Bay of Bengal

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Abstract

This paper analyzes the evolution of the South Asian High (SAH) during and after the development of tropical cyclone Neoguri over the South China Sea (SCS) in mid-April 2008, the formation of tropical storm Nargis over the Bay of Bengal (BOB) in late April, and the Asian summer monsoon onset, as well as their interrelationships. Numerical sensitivity experiments are conducted to explore the underlying mechanism responsible for these seasonal transitions in 2008. It is demonstrated that strong latent heating related with tropical cyclone activities over the SCS can enhance the development of the SAH aloft and generate zonal asymmetric potential vorticity (PV) forcing, with positive vorticity advection to its east and negative advection to its west. Following the decay of the tropical cyclone, this asymmetric forcing leads to instability development of the SAH, presenting as a slowly westward-propagating Rossby wave accompanied by a westward shift of the high PV advection. A strong upper tropospheric divergence on the southwest of the SAH also shifts westward, while positive PV eddies are shed from the high PV advection and eventually arrives in the southern BOB. Such synoptic patterns provide favorable pumping conditions for local cyclonic vorticity to develop. The latent heating release from the cyclogenesis further intensifies the upper-layer divergence, and the lower and upper circulations become phase locked, leading to the explosive development of the tropical cyclone over the southern BOB. Consequently, a tropical storm is generated and the BOB summer monsoon commences.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions. This study was jointly supported by the MOST Programme 2010CB950403 and 2012CB417203, CAS project XDA10010402 and NSF of China Projects 40925015 and 41275088.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Lab of Atmospheric Sciences and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics (LASG), Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100029, China

    Guoxiong Wu, Suling Ren, Qing Bao, Boqi Liu & Yimin Liu

  2. National Satellite Meteorological Center, China Meteorological Administration, Beijing, 100081, China

    Suling Ren & Jianmin Xu

  3. Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Suling Ren

  4. State Key Laboratory of Tropical Oceanography, South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academic of Sciences, Guangzhou, 510301, China

    Dongxiao Wang

  5. Key Laboratory of Meteorological Disaster of Ministry of Education (KLME), Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, 210044, China

    Boqi Liu

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  1. Guoxiong Wu
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  2. Suling Ren
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Correspondence to Yimin Liu.

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Wu, G., Ren, S., Xu, J. et al. Impact of tropical cyclone development on the instability of South Asian High and the summer monsoon onset over Bay of Bengal. Clim Dyn 41, 2603–2616 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-013-1766-0

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