Atmospheric moisture sources of drought and wet events during 1979–2019 in the Three-River Source Region, Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau

Abstract

The soil moisture observation data from the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau permafrost and alpine wetland (PAW) monitoring network and from the National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Final Analysis (FNL) from 1989 to 2019 were adopted to drive the Lagrangian backward trajectory model to simulate the water vapour transportation paths and source regions to the three-river source region during dry and wet episodes. The results showed that the water vapour transport paths mainly came from the land and ocean in the west during the extreme drought episodes based on the standardized precipitation index (SPI), including the northern African continent, the eastern European plains, and the mid-latitudes of the Atlantic Ocean. The water vapour source regions were mainly concentrated in the Kashmir region, northeast India and southern Motuo on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. When the SPI indicated an extremely wet state, the transport mainly occurred to the east and south, including the Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea, where water vapour entered the mainland from East/South China, passed through the Yangtze River Basin, and finally reached the three-river source region from east or south of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, while the water vapour from the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea passed through the Indian Peninsula and the Bay of Bengal and entered the three-river source region from the western and southern sides of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.