Abstract
Rain belts in East Asia frequently pose threats to human societies and natural systems. Advances in a skillful forecast on heavy precipitation require a deeper understanding of the preconditioned environments and the hydrologic cycle. Here, we disentangle 15 dominant moisture channels along four corridors reaching the Somali Jet, South Asia, Bay of Bengal, and Pacific basin for the warm-season rain belts. Among them, the Somali and South Asian channels were underappreciated in the literature. The results also highlight the importance of terrestrial moisture sources, and the close relationship between the moisture pathways and rain belts’ characteristics. Back-tracing the weather within a 2-week lead time reveals the pre-existing weather systems and circumglobal wave trains, that govern the moisture channels. Findings from this work develop a better understanding of East Asian rain belts’ water cycle, and may offer insights into model evaluation and heavy rainfall prediction at a longer lead time.
Highlights
Being the most influential and iconic weather phenomenon during the East Asian summer monsoon (EASM) season, the eastwest elongated rain belts often trigger landslides and floods that greatly disrupt agriculture, natural systems, and human properties
It may be surprising to know that the South documented but is crucial for supporting East Asian rain belts Asian channels fed by terrestrial sources are related to rain belt in the warm season, as suggested here
The Somali and South Asian corridors turn out to be crucial for supplying moisture to East Asian rain belts, but received less attention in the literature
Summary
Being the most influential and iconic weather phenomenon during the East Asian summer monsoon (EASM) season, the eastwest elongated rain belts often trigger landslides and floods that greatly disrupt agriculture, natural systems, and human properties. These rain belts exhibit a northward migration on the intraseasonal time scale, which orchestrates distinct monsoon stages in various parts of East Asia, such as the Pre-Meiyu, Meiyu/ Baiu and mid-summer stages[1,2,3,4]. We saw intensive endeavors to establish the source–receptor network to better understand the dominant sources for monsoon rainfall over continents[13,14,22,23].
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