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Changing monsoon and midlatitude circulation interactions over the Western Himalayas and possible links to occurrences of extreme precipitation

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Abstract

Historical rainfall records reveal that the frequency and intensity of extreme precipitation events, during the summer monsoon (June–September) season, have significantly risen over the Western Himalayas (WH) and adjoining upper Indus basin since 1950s. Using multiple datasets, the present study investigates the possible coincidences between an increasing trend of precipitation extremes over WH and changes in background flow climatology. The present findings suggest that the combined effects of a weakened southwest monsoon circulation, increased activity of transient upper-air westerly troughs over the WH region, enhanced moisture supply by southerly winds from the Arabian Sea into the Indus basin have likely provided favorable conditions for an increased frequency of certain types of extreme precipitation events over the WH region in recent decades.

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Acknowledgements

Authors thank IITM for extending all support for this research work. We are grateful to the two anonymous reviewer for suggesting critical value additions to the manuscript. We also thankfully acknowledge scientific discussions and useful suggestions provided by Dr. Ramesh Vellore. IITM is supported by the Ministry of Earth Sciences, Government of India, New Delhi. RAH is supported by National Science Foundation Grant AGS-1503155 and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory under Task Order 292896 (WACCEM) of Master Agreement 243766.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Climate Change Research, Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, 411 008, India

    P. Priya, R. Krishnan & Milind Mujumdar

  2. Department of Atmospheric and Space Science, Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune, India

    P. Priya

  3. University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Robert A. Houze Jr.

  4. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, USA

    Robert A. Houze Jr.

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  1. P. Priya
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Auxiliary Fig. A1

Wind at 850 hPa for the heavy rainfall events of a) 12 July 2010 b) 29 July 2010 c) 17 June 2013 and d) 04 September 2014. References for these four events are from Hong et al. (2011), Rasmussen et al. (2015), Vellore et al. (2015) and Lotus (2015) respectively. Wind data is taken from ERA Interim reanalysis. Note the trough-like feature in the upper-level extra-tropical westerlies. Differences in the low-level monsoon southwesterly winds can also be noted among the individual cases (PDF 762 kb)

Auxiliary Fig. A2

Time series of total count of extreme precipitation over WH [64°–76°E, 28°–40°N] region for APHRODITE (green) and TRMM3B42 (blue) datasets for the common period 1998–2007. These two times series are highly correlated (r = 0.97) (PDF 165 kb)

Auxiliary Fig. A3

Spatial map showing trend in frequency count of extreme rainfall events (rainfall > = 99th percentile; unit: count [18 year]−1) for the TRMM3B42 precipitation datasets for the period (1998–2015). Trend values exceeding the 95% confidence level based on a student’s t test (Santer et al. 2000) are marked with dots. The increasing trend of heavy rainfall over the upper Indus basin can be noticed. It is realized that the trends over Northwest India are different as compared to the APHRODITE dataset and will require further investigations (PDF 706 kb)

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Priya, P., Krishnan, R., Mujumdar, M. et al. Changing monsoon and midlatitude circulation interactions over the Western Himalayas and possible links to occurrences of extreme precipitation. Clim Dyn 49, 2351–2364 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-016-3458-z

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