Interdecadal moisture patterns and teleconnections in Monsoonal Asia over the past seven centuries

• Published in: International Journal of Climatology
• Main Authors: Zhou, Feifei, Fang, Keyan, Zhang, Fen, Li, Yingjun
• Other Authors: National Natural Science Foundation of China
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Wiley 2016
• Subjects: Antarctic; Indian; The Antarctic; Antarc*
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/joc.4745; https://api.wiley.com/onlinelibrary/tdm/v1/articles/10.1002%2Fjoc.4745; https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/joc.4745

ABSTRACT Interdecadal (10‐ to 100‐year oscillation) moisture variations over the Monsoonal Asia ( MA ) is highly variable across regions and time, which are relatively less understood due to the shortness of the instrumental data of a few decades. In this study, comprehensive investigations on the spatiotemporal distributions of the interdecadal moisture variations over MA as well as their evolution from prior to the industrial era were conducted utilizing the tree‐ring based drought reconstructions, i.e. the Monsoonal Asia Drought Atlas. Nine interdecadal moisture patterns in MA are identified using the self‐organizing map based on the ensemble empirical mode decomposition. To further investigate these interdecadal moisture patterns, we aggregated the selected nine nodes into four patterns using a hierarchical clustering approach. Among them, Pattern 1 stands for a teleconnection between the Northeast MA and the Indian Peninsula, and Pattern 2 represents a dipole pattern between the Southern and Northern MA . We find that Pattern 1 may be linked with the dynamics of the Antarctic Oscillation that can modulate the strength of the Asian summer monsoon through meridional teleconnections. Pattern 2 is mainly driven by the elevated El Niño‐Southern Oscillation variance and the zonal ‘Silk Road Pattern’ to bridge this interdecadal modulation.