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Influence of Tibetan Plateau on the North American summer monsoon precipitation

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Abstract

It has been well known that the uplift of the Tibetan Plateau (TP) can significantly enhance the Asian monsoon. Here, by comparing the sensitivity experiments with and without the TP, we find that the TP uplift can also increase the precipitation of the North American Summer Monsoon (NASM), with atmosphere teleconnection accounting for 6% and oceanic dynamical process accounting for another 6%. Physically, the TP uplift generates a stationary Rossby wave train traveling from the Asian continent to the North Atlantic region, resulting in an high-pressure anomaly over the tropical-subtropical North Atlantic. This high pressure system enhances the low-level easterly winds, forcing an enhanced upward motion over the North American monsoon (NAM) region and then an increase in summer precipitation there. In addition, the TP uplift enhances the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, which reduces the meridional temperature gradient and leads to a northward shift of Hadley Cell over eastern Pacific-Atlantic section. The latter shifts the convection center northward to 10°N and further increases the NASM precipitation. The enhanced NASM precipitation can also be understood by the northward shift of Intertropical Convergence Zone. Our study implies that the changes of NAM climate can be affected by not only local process but also remote forcing, including those from Asian highland region.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the NSF of China (Nos. 91737204, 41725021, 41376007, 41630527, 4201101394, 42005012, 41971108, and 91437218), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Nos. B210201009), and the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (Nos. BK20201058). The experiments were performed on the supercomputers at the Chinese National Supercomputer Centre in Tianjin (Tian-He No. 1). We thank three anonymous reviewers for their efforts to substantially improve this article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Geography, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, 210023, China

    Qin Wen & Jian Liu

  2. Jiangsu Center for Collaborative Innovation in Geographical Information Resource Development and Application, Nanjing, 210023, China

    Qin Wen & Jian Liu

  3. Key Laboratory of Virtual Geographic Environment (Nanjing Normal University) , Ministry of Education, Nanjing, 210023, China

    Qin Wen

  4. Open Studio for Ocean-Climate-Isotope Modeling, Pilot National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology (Qingdao), Qingdao, 266100, China

    Qin Wen

  5. College of Oceanography, Hohai University, Nanjing, 210024, China

    Zixuan Han

  6. Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Institute of Atmospheric Science and CMA-FDU Joint Laboratory of Marine Meteorology, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200438, China

    Haijun Yang

  7. School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Yancheng Institute of Technology, Yancheng, 224051, China

    Jianbo Cheng

  8. Department of Geography, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

    Zhengyu Liu

  9. Jiangsu Provincial Key Laboratory for Numerical Simulation of Large Scale Complex Systems, School of Mathematical Science, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, 210023, China

    Jian Liu

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  1. Qin Wen
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Wen, Q., Han, Z., Yang, H. et al. Influence of Tibetan Plateau on the North American summer monsoon precipitation. Clim Dyn 57, 3093–3110 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-021-05857-y

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