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Influence of wintertime surface sensible heat flux variability over the central and eastern Tibetan Plateau on the East Asian winter monsoon

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Abstract

Analyses of in situ and reanalysis output are performed to examine linkages between surface sensible heat fluxes over the central and eastern Tibetan Plateau (CETP) and indices of the East Asian winter monsoon (EAWM) and wintertime near-surface air temperatures over China. The results demonstrate that the sensible heat fluxes over CETP exhibit substantial decadal variability with positive, negative and positive phase during 1980–1987, 1988–2002 and 2003–2014, respectively. This decadal variability exhibits statistically significant associations with sub-components of EAWM and surface temperature anomalies over eastern China. The recovery of decadal change in wintertime sensible heat fluxes from negative to positive phase over CETP over the past decade (since 2003) has been associated with intensification and northward displacement of the East Asian subtropical jet (EASJ), enhanced and westward displacement of East Asian trough and strengthening of the Siberian High. Such processes are associated with the strengthening of EAWM, as well as cold air advection from high latitudes towards the south. Increased wintertime sensible heat fluxes over CETP is associated with markedly changes in the meridional temperature gradient that in term intensifies upper-level zone flow in the EASJ region, which provides a key physical factor linking the anomalies of sensible heat fluxes and EAWM.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank three anomalous reviewers for their constructive comments, which helped greatly in improving this paper. This study was jointly supported by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2018M641912), the National Key Research and Development Program (2016YFA0600602), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41790472), the Special Fund for Tibetan Plateau Research (GYHY201406001) and Fudan University-Tibet University Joint Laboratory For Biodiversity and Global Change. SCP is supported by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science (DE-SC0016438 and DE-SC0016605). The authors wish to acknowledge ECMWF for providing reanalysis products. Output from ERA-Interim is available for download from http://apps.ecmwf.int/datasets/. The authors also acknowledge the provision of high-quality, near-surface data from the China Meteorological Administration (CMA). These near-surface observations are available from http://www.ncc-cma.net/cn/.

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Correspondence to Renhe Zhang.

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Chen, L., Zhang, R., Pryor, S.C. et al. Influence of wintertime surface sensible heat flux variability over the central and eastern Tibetan Plateau on the East Asian winter monsoon. Clim Dyn 54, 4589–4603 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-020-05246-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-020-05246-x

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