Abstract
Numerical experiments with different idealized land and mountain distributions are carried out to study the formation of the Asian monsoon and related coupling processes. Results demonstrate that when there is only extratropical continent located between 0 and 120°E and between 20/30°N and the North Pole, a rather weak monsoon rainband appears along the southern border of the continent, coexisting with an intense intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ). The continuous ITCZ surrounds the whole globe, prohibits the development of near-surface cross-equatorial flow, and collects water vapor from tropical oceans, resulting in very weak monsoon rainfall. When tropical lands are integrated, the ITCZ over the longitude domain where the extratropical continent exists disappears as a consequence of the development of a strong surface cross-equatorial flow from the winter hemisphere to the summer hemisphere. In addition, an intense interaction between the two hemispheres develops, tropical water vapor is transported to the subtropics by the enhanced poleward flow, and a prototype of the Asian monsoon appears. The Tibetan Plateau acts to enhance the coupling between the lower and upper tropospheric circulations and between the subtropical and tropical monsoon circulations, resulting in an intensification of the East Asian summer monsoon and a weakening of the South Asian summer monsoon. Linking the Iranian Plateau to the Tibetan Plateau substantially reduces the precipitation over Africa and increases the precipitation over the Arabian Sea and the northern Indian subcontinent, effectively contributing to the development of the South Asian summer monsoon.
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Acknowledgments
This study was jointly supported by the MOST Programme (2010CB950403 and 2012CB417200), and the NSFC Projects (40925015, 40875034). BD was supported by the U.K. National Centre for Atmospheric Science-Climate (NCAS-Climate). We thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions on the improvement of the manuscript.
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This paper is a contribution to the special issue on Global Monsoon Climate, a product of the Global Monsoon Working Group of the Past Global Changes (PAGES) project, coordinated by Pinxian Wang, Bin Wang, and Thorsten Kiefer.
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Wu, G., Liu, Y., Dong, B. et al. Revisiting Asian monsoon formation and change associated with Tibetan Plateau forcing: I. Formation. Clim Dyn 39, 1169–1181 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-012-1334-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-012-1334-z