Authors:
SUI Yue 1,2 and LANG Xian-Mei3
1 Nansen-Zhu International Research Centre, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, China
2 University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
3 International Center for Climate and Environment Sciences, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, China
Abstract :
The authors investigate monsoon change in East Asia in the 21st century under the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) A1B scenario using the results of a regional climate model, RegCM3, with a high horizontal resolution. First, the authors evaluate the model's erformance compared with NCEP-NCAR reanalysis data, showing that the model can reliably reproduce the basic climatology of both winter and summer monsoons over East Asia. Next, it is found that the winter monsoon in East Asia would slightly weaken in the 21st century with spatial differences. Over northern East China,anomalous southerly winds would dominate in the midand late-21st century because the zonal land-sea thermal contrast is expected to become smaller, due to a stronger warming trend over land than over ocean. However, the intensity of the summer monsoon in East Asia shows a statistically significant upward trend over this century because the zonal land-sea thermal contrast between East Asia and the western North Pacific would become larger,which, in turn, would lead to larger sea level pressure gradients throughout East Asia and extending to the adjacent ocean.
Keywords :
monsoon, East Asia, RegCM3, projection
Citation:
Sui, Y., and X.-M. Lang, 2012: Monsoon change in East Asia in the 21st century: Results of RegCM3, Atmos. Oceanic Sci. Lett., 5, 504–508.