Role of land surface processes in monsoon development: East Asia and West Africa

Abstract

Evidence is presented that exchanges of water and energy between the vegetation and the atmosphere play an important role in east Asian and West African monsoon development and are among the most important mechanisms governing the development of the monsoon. The results were obtained by conducting simulations for five months of 1987 using a general circulation model (GCM) coupled with two different land surface parameterizations, with and without explicit vegetation representations, referred to as the GCM/vegetation and the GCM/soil, respectively. The two land surface models produced similar results at the planetary scale but substantial differences at regional scales, especially in the monsoon regions and some of the large continental areas. In the simulation with GCM/soil, the east Asian summer monsoon moisture transport and precipitation were too strong in the premonsoon season, and an important east Asian monsoon feature, the abrupt monsoon northward jump, was unclear. In the GCM/vegetation simulation, the abrupt northward jump and other monsoon evolution processes were simulated, such as the large‐scale turning of the low‐level airflow during the early monsoon stage in both regions. With improved initial soil moisture and vegetation maps, the intensity and spatial distribution of the summer precipitation were also improved. The two land surface representations produced different longitudinal and latitudinal sensible heat gradients at the surface that, in turn, influenced the low‐level temperature and pressure gradients, wind flow (through geostrophic balance), and moisture transport. It is suggested that the great east‐west thermal gradient may contribute to the abrupt northward jump and the latitudinal heating gradient may contribute to the clockwise and counterclockwise turning of the low‐level wind. The results showed that under unstable atmospheric conditions, not only low‐frequency mean forcings from the land surface, such as monthly mean albedo, but also the perturbation processes of vegetation were important to the monsoon evolution, affecting its intensity, the spatial distribution of precipitation, and associated circulation at the continental scale.