East Asian Summer Monsoon Region Research Articles

Impacts of global warming on changes in the East Asian monsoon and the related river discharge in a global time-slice experiment

Changes in the East Asian monsoon and the related river discharge under global warm- ing conditions are investigated using 2 time-slice simulations of the IS92a scenario with a T106 atmospheric general circulation model (ECHAM4) for 1971 to 1980 and 2041 to 2050. Daily runoff and drainage calculated by the land-surface scheme are used as input to a hydrological model to diagnose changes in the Yangtze River and Zhujiang River discharges. In the future climate, the sim- ulated annual cycle of precipitation over the southeastern coastal area of China is systematically shifted about 1 mo ahead compared with the present-day climate, and the rainy season starts 1 mo earlier for the Yangtze River Valley and North China. In line with the surface-warming distribution change, the East Asian summer monsoon (EAM) flow strengthens. This causes increased precipita- tion in North China. In winter, the subtropical part of the EAM flow strengthens and leads to a large increase in rainfall over the EAM region. The discharges of the Zhujiang and Yangtze rivers in the future climate decrease in the late summer and autumn, to which both increased evaporation and an early retreat of the monsoon rainfall contribute. In the early and mid-summer, the Yangtze River discharge increases, mainly due to the large increase in precipitation in the preceding months, which has been stored in the catchment.

Rainy Season of the Asian–Pacific Summer Monsoon*

To date, the monsoon-research community has not yet reached a consensus on a unified definition of monsoon rainy season or on the linkage between the onsets over the Asian continent and the adjacent oceans. A single rainfall parameter is proposed, and a suite of universal criteria for defining the domain, onset, peak, and withdrawal of the rainy season are developed. These results reveal a cohesive spatial–temporal structure of the Asian–Pacific monsoon rainy season characteristics, which will facilitate validation of monsoon hydrological cycles simulated by climate system models and improve our understanding of monsoon dynamics. The large-scale onset of the Asian monsoon rainy season consists of two phases. The first phase begins with the rainfall surges over the South China Sea (SCS) in mid-May, which establishes a planetary-scale monsoon rainband extending from the south Asian marginal seas (the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, and the SCS) to the subtropical western North Pacific (WNP). The rainband then advances northwestward, initiating the continental Indian rainy season, the Chinese mei-yu, and the Japanese baiu in early to mid-June (the second phase). The heights of the rainy seasons occur primarily in three stepwise phases: in late June over the mei-yu/baiu regions, the northern Bay of Bengal, and the vicinity of the Philippines, in late July over India and northern China; and in mid-August over the tropical WNP. The rainy season retreats northward over east Asia, yet it moves southward over India and the WNP. Clear distinctions in the characteristics of the rainy season exist among the Indian, east Asian, and WNP summer monsoon regions. Nevertheless, the rainy seasons of the three subsystems also show close linkage. The causes of the regional distinctions and linkages are discussed. Also discussed are the atypical monsoon rainy seasons, such as the skewed and bimodal seasonal distributions found in various places of Asian monsoon domain.

Sensitivity of numerical simulations of the East Asian summer monsoon rainfall and circulation to different cumulus parameterization schemes

A 5-level spectral AGCM (ImPKU-5LAGCM) is used to examine the sensitivity of the simulated results of the summer monsoon rainfall and circulation in East Asia to different cumulus parameterization schemes in the climatological-mean case and in the cases of weak and strong Asian summer monsoons, respectively. The results simulated with the Arakawa-Schubert’s(hereafter A-S’s), Kuo’s and Manabe’s cumulus parameterization schemes show that these simulated distributions of the summer monsoon rainfall and circulation in East Asia depend strongly on the cumulus parameterization schemes either in the climatological—mean case or in the cases of weak and strong Asian summer monsoons. From the simulated results, it might be shown that the Kuo scheme appears to be more suitable for the simulation of the summer monsoon rainfall and circulation in East Asia than the A—S scheme or the Manabe scheme, although the A—S scheme is somewhat better in the simulations of the tropical rainfall. This might be due to that the Kuo’s cumulus parameterization scheme is able to reflect well the characteristics of rainfall cloud system in the East Asian summer monsoon region, where the rainfall system used to be a mixing of cumulus and stratus.