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Slow and fast annual cycles of the Asian summer monsoon in the NCEP CFSv2

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Abstract

The climatological Asian summer monsoon (ASM) is decomposed into the slow and fast annual cycles (SAC and FAC). The FAC represents the abrupt onset and breaks phase-locked to the ASM seasonal progression. This study evaluates how well the NCEP Climate Forecast System version 2 (CFSv2) simulates the SAC and FAC over the Indian and East Asia monsoon regions (IMR and EAMR). The simulated SACs are in good agreement with observations in both regions. The FAC also represents the northward propagation in both observations and CFSv2. It is further demonstrated that the FAC is associated with a thermodynamic air–sea interaction. In particular, the different roles played by the wind-evaporation-SST (WES) feedback may account for the faster propagation in the IMR than the EAMR. However, compared with observations, the simulated FAC shows earlier monsoon onset and long-lasting stronger dry and wet phases in the IMR but delayed monsoon onset with weaker and less organized FAC in the EAMR. These reversed behaviors may originate from a warm (cold) SST bias in the IMR (EAMR) in boreal spring and enhanced by an overly sensitive surface evaporation to wind changes in the CFSv2. As a result, the warm spring SST bias in the IMR initiates a strong WES feedback and changes of solar insolation during boreal summer, which leads to a cold SST bias in early fall. On the other hand, the cold spring SST bias in the EAMR accounts for a weaker air–sea coupling, which in turn results in a warm SST bias after the withdrawal of the monsoon.

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Notes

  1. It is somewhat not consistent with the monsoon date showing a zonally uniform fashion there in Fig. 5 (right panel), mainly due to overestimated rainfall in January (or winter) in CFSv2 (Fig. 7b). This seems to imply that unlike observation, the relative climatological pentad mean rainfall may not be the best way to define the simulated monsoon onset and withdrawal in Fig. 5.

  2. The SAC is defined as the first four harmonics as stated in Sect. 2. However, the SAC of precipitation sometimes has negative value in some grids, which is not physically meaningful. This is the reason why the OLR data is used in this study, instead of precipitation, in addition to the fact that the OLR data is very useful as a proxy for rainfall and used in most of the observational studies on this issue.

  3. Anomalies from the SAC are exactly identical to the FACs, thus they are interchangeably used in this section.

  4. As noted earlier, heat fluxes into the ocean are defined as positive.

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Acknowledgments

This research is supported by a grant from the Indian Institute of Technology and the Ministry of Earth Sciences, Government of India. The authors would like to thank Drs. J. L. Kinter and J. Shukla for their support and guidance. The authors appreciate the constructive comments from anonymous reviewers.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, Fairfax, VA, USA

    Chul-Su Shin & Bohua Huang

  2. Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Earth Sciences, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

    Chul-Su Shin & Bohua Huang

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Correspondence to Chul-Su Shin.

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Shin, CS., Huang, B. Slow and fast annual cycles of the Asian summer monsoon in the NCEP CFSv2. Clim Dyn 47, 529–553 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-015-2854-0

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