Abstract
The climatological characteristics of the moisture budget over the joining area of Asia and the Indian-Pacific Ocean (AIPO) and its adjacent regions as well as their anomalies have been estimated in this study. The main results are as follows.
In the winter, the northeasterly moisture transport covers the extensive areas at the lower latitudes of the AIPO. The westerly and northerly moisture transport is the major source and the South Indian Ocean (SIO) is the moisture sink. In the summer, influenced by the southwesterly monsoonal wind, the cross-equatorial southwesterly moisture transport across Somali originating from the SIO is transported through the Arabian Sea (AS), the Bay of Bengal (BOB), and the South China Sea (SCS) to eastern China. The AIPO is controlled by the southwesterly moisture transport.
The net moisture influx over the AIPO has obvious interannual and interdecadal variations. From the mid- or late 1970s, the influxes over the SIO, the AS, the northern part of the western North Pacific (NWNP), and North China (NC) as well as South China (SC) begin to decrease abruptly, while those over Northeast China (NEC) and the Yangtze River-Huaihe River basins (YHRB) have increased remarkably. As a whole, the net moisture influxes over the BOB and the southern part of the western North Pacific (SWNP) in the recent 50 years take on a linear increasing trend. However, the transition timing for these two regions is different with the former being at the mid- or late 1980s and the latter occurring earlier, approximately at the early stage of the 1970s.
The anomalous moisture source associated with the precipitation anomalies is different from the normal conditions of the summer precipitation. For the drought or flood years or the years of El Niño and its following years, the anomalous moisture transport originating from the western North Pacific (WNP) is the vital source of the anomalous precipitation over eastern China, which is greatly related with the variation of the subtropical Pacific high.
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Liu, Y., Ding, Y., Song, Y. et al. Climatological characteristics of the moisture budget and their anomalies over the joining area of Asia and the Indian-Pacific Ocean. Adv. Atmos. Sci. 26, 642–655 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00376-009-9010-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00376-009-9010-x