Abstract
The East Asian summer monsoon (EASM) is a unique regional monsoon in the extratropics involving not only tropical but midlatitude processes. Most of the previous studies identified the role of condensational heating which is largely relevant to the tropical moisture transport in determining the dynamical structure of EASM. However, how midlatitude synoptic eddy activities can affect the EASM structure has not been well recognized. With dynamical diagnoses, this study revisits the EASM structure by emphasizing the roles of feedbacks of condensational heating versus synoptic eddy activities. As EASM is characterized by a grand low-level low with strong humid southerly flows extending from the tropics to the northeastern Asia, its vertical structure is found to have a dramatic meridional difference bounded at around 35.5°N. In the southern domain, EASM features a meridional overturning cell and a baroclinic structure with an upper-level high versus a lower-level low in geopotential height, which are primarily controlled by substantial condensational heating due to abundant monsoon precipitation. However, in the northern domain, EASM exhibits an equivalent barotropic structure with an upper-level low versus a lower-level low. Such a unique structure results from a combined effect of feedbacks of condensational heating and synoptic eddy activities, in which the upper-level low is dominated by the synoptic eddy dynamical feedback while the lower-level low is induced by the both feedbacks. The role of the midlatitude synoptic eddy activities in shaping the EASM structure proposed in this study provides a new perspective for understanding the formation and variation of EASM.
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The Japanese 55 year Reanalysis (JRA–55) is available at https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate–data/jra–55. The Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (CFSR) is achieved from https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate–data/climate–forecast–system–reanalysis–cfsr. The global daily precipitation data set from NOAA Climate Prediction Center (CPC) is available at https://downloads.psl.noaa.gov/Datasets/cpc_global_precip/.
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Acknowledgements
This work is jointly supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2022YFE0106600), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41875086, 41621005), and the Jiangsu lift project for Young Talent (2022). The authors would appreciate two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions to improve the manuscript. The authors are also grateful to Xuguang Sun, Yiquan Jiang, and Zhiqi Zhang for their assistance in making the plots of this manuscript.
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This study is jointly supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2022YFE0106600), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41875086, 41621005), and the Jiangsu lift project for Young Talent (2022).
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. The main idea of the study was put forward by XQY. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by SC and XQY. The manuscript was written by SC and improved by XQY, LS and JF. All authors reviewed and approved the final manuscript.
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Chen, S., Yang, XQ., Fang, J. et al. Revisiting the East Asian summer monsoon structure: a combined effect of condensational heating and synoptic eddy activities. Clim Dyn 61, 3787–3803 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-023-06763-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-023-06763-1