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Western Pacific emergent constraint lowers projected increase in Indian summer monsoon rainfall

Nature Climate Change volume 7, pages 708–712 (2017)Cite this article

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Abstract

The agrarian-based socioeconomic livelihood of densely populated South Asian countries is vulnerable to modest changes in Indian summer monsoon (ISM) rainfall1,2,3. How the ISM rainfall will evolve is a question of broad scientific and socioeconomic importance3,4,5,6,7,8,9. In response to increased greenhouse gas (GHG) forcing, climate models commonly project an increase in ISM rainfall4,5,6,7,8,9. This wetter ISM projection, however, does not consider large model errors in both the mean state and ocean warming pattern9,10,11. Here we identify a relationship between biases in simulated present climate and future ISM projections in a multi-model ensemble: models with excessive present-day precipitation over the tropical western Pacific tend to project a larger increase in ISM rainfall under GHG forcing because of too strong a negative cloud–radiation feedback on sea surface temperature. The excessive negative feedback suppresses the local ocean surface warming, strengthening ISM rainfall projections via atmospheric circulation. We calibrate the ISM rainfall projections using this ‘present–future relationship’ and observed western Pacific precipitation. The correction reduces by about 50% of the projected rainfall increase over the broad ISM region. Our study identifies an improved simulation of western Pacific convection as a priority for reliable ISM projections.

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Figure 1: Regional climate changes during the ISM season (May to September) and the relationship between ISM rainfall changes and mean precipitation.
Figure 2: Inter-model relationship between the present-day simulations and future projections and corrections of regional climate projections.
Figure 3: Inter-model regressions of projected changes under the RCP 8.5 scenario against the simulated present-day precipitation (mm d−1) averaged over the tropical western Pacific.
Figure 4: Atmospheric response to the tropical Pacific warming pattern related to the tropical western Pacific precipitation biases in the CAM4 experiment.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful for helpful comments from L. Sun and R. Lu. This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China (41521005 and 41406026), the National Basic Research Program of China (2012CB955603), the Guangdong Natural Science Funds for Distinguished Young Scholar (2015A030306008), the Youth Innovation Promotion Association CAS, and the Pearl River S&T Nova Program of Guangzhou (201506010094). S.-P.X. was supported by the US National Science Foundation (1637450). Z.C. was supported by the Open Project Program of State Key Laboratory of Tropical Oceanography (LTOZZ1603). We acknowledge the climate modelling groups for producing and making available their model output, the WCRP’s Working Group on Coupled Modeling (WGCM) for organizing the CMIP5 analysis activity, the Program for Climate Model Diagnostics and Intercomparison (PCMDI) for collecting and archiving the CMIP5 multi-model data, and the Office of Science, US Department of Energy for supporting these datasets in partnership with the Global Organization for Earth System Science Portals.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Tropical Oceanography, South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou, Guangdong, 510301, China

    Gen Li & Zesheng Chen

  2. Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California, 92093-0206, USA

    Shang-Ping Xie

  3. Physical Oceanography Laboratory/CIMST, Ocean University of China, and Qingdao National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology, Qingdao, Shandong, 266100, China

    Shang-Ping Xie

  4. Institute of Tropical and Marine Meteorology (ITMM), China Meteorological Administration (CMA), Guangzhou, Guangdong, 510640, China

    Chao He

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  1. Gen Li
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Contributions

G.L. designed the study and performed the analysis with feedback from S.-P.X. G.L. and S.-P.X. wrote the paper. C.H. and Z.C. carried out the CAM4 experiments.

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Correspondence to Gen Li.

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Li, G., Xie, SP., He, C. et al. Western Pacific emergent constraint lowers projected increase in Indian summer monsoon rainfall. Nature Clim Change 7, 708–712 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3387

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