Indian monsoon derailed by a North Atlantic wavetrain
Season of the drought
The Indian monsoon is a critical source of water for hundreds of millions of people, and when it fails to deliver its normal quantity of rain, enormous human, economic, and ecological costs can be incurred. Monsoon droughts are not always seasonal, however. Borah et al. found that nearly half of all monsoonal droughts were subseasonal and characterized by a steep decline in late-season rainfall. Moreover, this type of subseasonal drought appears to be related to a distinct cold anomaly in the North Atlantic Ocean, raising the possibility that monsoon droughts may be more predictable.
Science, this issue p. 1335
Abstract
The forecast of Indian monsoon droughts has been predicated on the notion of a season-long rainfall deficit linked to a warm equatorial Pacific. Here we show that nearly half of all droughts over the past century differ from this paradigm in that they (i) occur when Pacific temperatures are near-neutral and (ii) are subseasonal phenomena, characterized by an abrupt decline in late-season rainfall. This severe subseasonal rainfall deficit can be associated with a Rossby wave from mid-latitudes. Specifically, we find that the interaction of upper-level winds with an episodic North Atlantic vorticity anomaly results in a wavetrain that curves toward East Asia, disrupting the monsoon. This atmospheric teleconnection offers an avenue for improved predictability of droughts, especially in the absence of telltale signatures in the Pacific.
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Supplementary Material
Summary
Data and Methods
Supplementary Text
Figs. S1 to S7
Tables S1 and S2
Resources
File (aay6043_borah_sm.pdf)
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Information & Authors
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Published In
Science
Volume 370 | Issue 6522
11 December 2020
11 December 2020
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works.
This is an article distributed under the terms of the Science Journals Default License.
Submission history
Received: 4 July 2019
Accepted: 21 October 2020
Published in print: 11 December 2020
Acknowledgments
We thank R. S. Nanjundiah, J. Srinivasan, D. Sengupta, and D. S. Battisti for useful discussions; J. M. Wallace, R. Roca, and A. H. Sobel for constructive suggestions on improving the narrative; and R. Matthew for providing seasonal anomalies of monsoon rainfall over the homogeneous regions. We thank IMD, UK Met Office, and ECMWF for daily gridded rainfall, monthly gridded SST, and ERA 20th Century Reanalysis datasets, respectively. Funding: P.J.B. thanks the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India (GoI), for support under the INSPIRE PhD fellowship (IF160707). V.V. and J.S. thank DST, GoI, for financial support (DST/CCP/NCM/75/2017) under their Climate Change Programme. V.V. thanks the Ministry of Earth Sciences, GoI, for their support under the project (MOES/PAMC/H&C/41/2013-PC-II) “Advanced Hydrologic Research and Knowledge Dissemination.” J.S. thanks the University Grants Commission, GoI, for support under the Indo-Israel Joint Research Programme (F 6-3/2018). B.N.G. thanks the Science and Engineering Research Board, GoI, for the SERB Distinguished Fellowship. Author contributions: V.V. formulated the initial question of dominant drought patterns. P.M. performed the preliminary set of computations with monthly rainfall. P.J.B. performed all subsequent calculations with daily data. V.V. and J.S. were involved in all of the analysis and interpretation and took the lead in writing the manuscript. B.N.G contributed to the interpretation and writing of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests. Data and materials availability: Data sources and their access has been provided in the data and methods section in the SM.
Authors
Funding Information
University Grants Commission: F 6-3/2018
Ministry of Earth Sciences: MOES/PAMC/H&C/41/2013-PC-II
Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India: DST/CCP/NCM/75/2017
Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India: SERB Distinguished Fellowship (SB /DF - 004 /2018)
Department of Science and Technology, Govt of India: INSPIRE PhD Fellowship IF160707
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