Natural climate swings contribute more to increased monsoon rainfall than global warming

Monsoon rainfall in the Northern Hemisphere impacts about 60% of the World population in Southeast Asia, West Africa and North America. Given the possible impacts of global warming, solid predictions of monsoon rainfall for the next decades are important for infrastructure planning and sustainable economic development.

Such predictions, however, are very complex because they require not only pinning down how manmade greenhouse gas emissions will impact the monsoons and monsoon rainfall, but also a knowledge of natural long-term climate swings, about which little is known so far.

To tackle this problem an international team of scientists around Meteorology Professor Bin Wang at the International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa, examined climate data to see what happened in the Northern Hemisphere during the last three decades, a time during which the global-mean surface-air temperature rose by about 0.4°C. Current theory predicts that the Northern Hemisphere summer monsoon circulation should weaken under anthropogenic global warming.

Wang and his colleagues, however, found that over the past 30 years, the summer monsoon circulation, as well as the Hadley and Walker circulations, have all substantially intensified. This intensification has resulted in significantly greater global summer monsoon rainfall in the Northern Hemisphere than predicted from greenhouse-gas-induced warming alone: namely a 9.5% increase, compared to the anthropogenic predicted contribution of 2.6% per degree of global warming.

Most of the recent intensification is attributable to a cooling of the eastern Pacific that began in 1998. This cooling is the result of natural long-term swings in ocean surface temperatures, particularly swings in the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation or mega-El Niño-Southern Oscillation, which has lately been in a mega-La Niña or cool phase. Another natural climate swing, called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, also contributes to the intensification of monsoon rainfall.

“These natural swings in the climate system must be understood in order to make realistic predictions of monsoon rainfall and of other climate features in the coming decades,” says Wang. “We must be able to determine the relative contributions of greenhouse-gas emissions and of long-term natural swings to future climate change.”

Citation: Bin Wang, Jian Liu, Hyung-Jin Kim, Peter J. Webster, So-Young Yim, and Baoqiang Xiang: Northern Hemisphere summer monsoon intensified by mega-El Niño/southern oscillation and Atlantic multidecadal oscillation. PNAS 2013; published ahead of print March 18, 2013, doi:10.1073/pnas.1219405110.

Funding for this work: B.W., S.-Y.Y., and B.X. acknowledge support from the International Pacific Research Center (IPRC) institutional support (JAMSTEC, NASA, and NOAA), Scientific Research Project of China Awards 2010CB950102 and XDA05080800 (to J.L. and B.W.), Korean Ministry of Education, Science and Technology Grant 2011-0021927 through Global Research Laboratory Program (to B.W.), National Science Foundation Awards AGS-1005599 (to B.W.) and ATM- 0965610 (to P.J.W.), Asian–Pacific Economic Cooperation Climate Center (B.X.), and the Program for Risk Information on Climate Change of Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan (H.-J.K.).

Researcher Contact: Bin Wang is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Meteorology, University of Hawaii at Manoa, and at the International Pacific Research Center (IPRC). Tel.: (808) 956-2563; email: wangbin@hawaii.edu

International Pacific Research Center Media Contact: Gisela E. Speidel, tel.: (808) 956-9252; email:gspeidel@hawaii.edu.

The International Pacific Research Center (IPRC) of the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST), University of Hawaii at Manoa, is a climate research center founded to gain greater understanding of the climate system and the nature and causes of climate variation in the Asia-Pacific region and how global climate changes may affect the region. Established under the “U.S.-Japan Common Agenda for Cooperation in Global Perspective” in October 1997, the IPRC is a collaborative effort between agencies in Japan and the United States.