An assessment of monsoon precipitation changes during 1901–2001

Abstract

Changes of global land monsoon precipitation are assessed by using three sets of rain-gauge precipitation data for the period of 1901–2002 compiled by GPCC, CRU and Dai-dataset, respectively. The three datasets show consistent long-term changes of precipitation over the monsoon region with slightly different amplitudes. During 1901–2001, global land monsoon precipitation (GMI) exhibits multi-decadal variations, with an overall increasing trend from 1901 to 1955, followed by a decreasing trend up to 2001. The upward trends of global and Northern hemispheric land monsoon precipitation during 1901–1955 are mainly resulted from the increased precipitation over the North African, Indian and East Asian monsoon domains. For the whole period of 1901–2001, precipitation averaged over the Northern Hemisphere and global land monsoon areas both exhibit a decreasing trend although it is only statistically significant at the 5% level for the Northern Hemisphere. The robust decreasing trend of Northern hemispheric land monsoon precipitations during the twentieth century mainly comes from the downward trend of North African and eastern part of Indian monsoon precipitation and occurs mainly after the 1950s. The first leading mode of Empirical orthogonal function (EOF) analysis of precipitation annual range features a coherent change of North African, South Asian, Northeast China, southern South African, eastern Australian and western American monsoon, and a coherent change over the equatorial South African monsoon and eastern American monsoon. The corresponding principal component time series also indicate that the majority of global land monsoon precipitation has experienced an increasing tendency from 1901 to 1955 and a decreasing trend since the 1950s. Examination on the impact of station number change indicates a negligible influence on the results, especially after 1905.