Abstract
Monsoon precipitation is the major driver of agricultural productivity in the Myanmar Coast; it is crucial to quantify and understand recent changes in precipitation during the monsoon season over this region. By using multiple precipitation datasets, we demonstrate that total precipitation during monsoon season over the Myanmar Coast has increased slightly but not significantly, but precipitation during the onset and withdrawal phases of monsoon season exhibit a significant increasing trend during 1979–2015, and the contribution of precipitation during the two phases to total monsoon precipitation has increased significantly. The increased precipitation during the onset phase over the Myanmar Coast directly results from the earlier onset of the South Asian Summer Monsoon in recent decades, which is associated with the phase transition of the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation in the late 1990s. And the precipitation increase during the withdrawal phase is directly due to the enhances of the ascending motion and convection around this region, which is dynamically correlated to the anomalous cyclone-like circulation around the Bay of Bengal as well as the strengthening of the cross-equatorial flow around the equatorial Indian Ocean.
Highlights
Monsoon precipitation is the major driver of agricultural productivity in many tropical and subtropical regions in the world, and its variability influences the livelihood of a large share of the world’s population (Parthasarathy et al 1994)
We focus on recent trends in precipitation in the monsoon season over MC, which is an important rice-producing region in the world and the front land in the South Asian Summer Monsoon (SASM) region
Results from multiple precipitation datasets show that total precipitation in the monsoon season has increased slightly but not significantly, but precipitation during the onset and withdrawal phase of monsoon season over this region exhibits a significant increasing trend in recent decades
Summary
Monsoon precipitation is the major driver of agricultural productivity in many tropical and subtropical regions in the world, and its variability influences the livelihood of a large share of the world’s population (Parthasarathy et al 1994). 2012; Misra and DiNapoli 2014; Shahi et al 2018), and East Asia (Chan and Zhou 2005; Kajikawa and Wang 2012; Lu et al 2016; Huang et al 2018) These studies are conducted on large scales and provide valuable results and conclusions. The monsoon precipitation over the Myanmar Coast represents an important heat source in the tropical climate system, which plays a seminal role in the variation of the tropospheric temperature gradient between ocean and land and Asian monsoon circulation (Kumar et al 2014). The earliest onset of the South Asian Summer Monsoon (SASM) typically occurs in the Bay of Bengal (BOB) and Myanmar Coast, i.e. the latter is the land that first experiences the summer monsoon and monsoon precipitation (Wang 2002; Fosu and Wang 2015). We believe Myanmar Coast provides an appropriate test bed for studying the summer monsoon and monsoon precipitation and choose this region as the research area
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