Abstract
The summer precipitation in South China (SC) has experienced a pronounced interdecadal variation during 1983–2013 with trend transition in the late 1990s. This study quantitatively investigates the precipitation variation and its connection to water vapor transport by combining the Lagrangian trajectory-based Dynamic Recycling Model and the clustering method of self-organizing map. The external moisture outside of SC explains most (84%) of the mean and the interdecadal variation of the summer rainfall, mainly through the southwest transport pathways. A long-distance southwest pathway related to cross-equatorial flow and eastward flow over the Northern Indian Ocean explains 31.5% of mean precipitation and 50.4% of the upward precipitation trend before 1997. The other branch of the southwest pathways has relatively shorter length over North Indian Ocean, South China Sea, and Southeast Asia, explaining 35.7% of the mean and 51.2% of the downward trend after 1997. Also, for the downward trend, the westerly-driven moisture transport over Eurasia acts as the second contributor (32.2%) to the precipitation decrease. However, the western-Pacific pathway explains the smallest portion (≤ 3%) of the trends, suggesting weak influence from the subtropical high. The large-scale circulation anomaly in the form of zonal and meridional wave trains control the interdecadal variability of the SC precipitation. It is found that the circumglobal teleconnection and Pacific–Japan teleconnection significantly correlate to the two wave trains, whose match relation strongly modulates the trend transition in the 1990s for the SC summer precipitation.
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Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the National Climate Center (NCC) of China (http://ncc.cma.gov.cn) for the observations, the ECMWF data center (http://apps.ecmwf.int/datasets/data/interim_full_daily/) for the ERA-Interim data, and the National Weather Service (NWS) Climate Prediction Center (CPC) (http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/pna/nao.shtml) for the teleconnection indices. This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China under Grant 2016YFA0600403, the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences under Grant XDA20020201, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant 41475072.
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Zhong, L., Hua, L., Ma, Z. et al. A quantitative study of moisture transport variation on the interdecadal variation of the summer precipitation in South China from 1979 to 2015. Clim Dyn 53, 4743–4761 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-019-04822-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-019-04822-0