Abstract
This paper investigates the causes for the interdecadal change in the relationships between early and late summer precipitation over South China (SC). It is found that the correlations of the precipitation over SC between June and August shift from weak positive in 1979–1995 to significantly negative in 1996–2019. Further analysis demonstrates that the distinct evolution of sea surface temperature (SST) pattern between the two periods accounts for the interdecadal variations of their relationships. Although the warming of the tropical western Indian Ocean (WIO) in June favors increasing precipitation over the SC via enhancing the Northwest Pacific Subtropical High (NWPSH) during the whole period, the associated SST anomalies in August are rather different between the two periods. Specifically, the WIO warming in June corresponds to slightly positive anomalies over the tropical central-eastern Pacific in August during the 1979–1995, which has weak impact on the NWPSH and results in a weak precipitation correlation between June and August. However, the WIO warming in June corresponds to La Niña’s rapid development in August during the 1996–2019, which favors the enhancement of the NWPSH via increasing the regional Hadley circulation. Due to the climatologically northward movement of NWPSH from June to August, the enhanced NWPSH in August acts to decrease the precipitation over SC, causing a significantly negative correlation between precipitation in June and August. Overall, the distinct evolution of tropical SST pattern is the key factor inducing the change of the relationships between June and August precipitation in the two periods.
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The daily precipitation data set were downloaded from the National Meteorological Information Center, China Meteorological Administration (http://data.cma.cn/data/cdcindex/cid/6d1b5efbdcbf9a58.html). The reanalysis data in this paper were downloaded from the Version2 Global Precipitation Climatology Project (https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.gpcp.html) and the National Centers for Environment Prediction–Department of Energy (NCEP–DOE) Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project-II reanalysis dataset (NCEP2) (https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.ncep.reanalysis2.html), and OAFlux dataset were downloaded from WHOI OAFlux Project (https://oaflux.whoi.edu/data-access/). And the Ocean data were downloaded from the NCEP Global Ocean Data Assimilation System (https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.godas.html), and the Hadley Centre Sea Ice and Sea Surface Temperature (HadISST) dataset (https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadisst/data/download.html), and the Extended Reconstructed SST (ERSST) version 4 (https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.noaa.ersst.html).
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NCAR Command Language (NCL).
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Acknowledgements
This study acknowledges the support of the State Key Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China (42130610), the General Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42075057, 41875100, 41975098 and 41905057), Key project of Jiangsu Meteorological Research Foundation (KZ202102).
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GF, ZG and JY designed research; SL performed research; SL and ZG analyzed data; SL and ZG wrote the paper. SL, ZG, GF, JY, SZ and SQ contributed to reviewing the manuscript. All authors have read and approved the final manuscript.
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Li, S., Gong, Z., Zhang, S. et al. Decadal variation of the precipitation relationship between June and August over South China and its mechanism. Clim Dyn 59, 1863–1882 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-021-06073-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-021-06073-4