Soil moisture data of 45 years from European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Re-Analysis (ERA-40) and the in situ observational data are used to study the temporal and spatial characteristics of the soil moisture in boreal spring in the area to the east of 100°E in China. Results show that ERA-40 soil moisture well reproduces the temporal and spatial features of observations. ERA-40 data capture the spatial pattern that the soils in Northeast China and Southwest China are wetter than those in Inner Mongolia and North China and represent the inter-annual variability in ob-servations. The dry trends of spring soil moisture are evident over the whole eastern China. It is espe-cially prominent for the dry trend in southwest China where the spring soil from surface to deep-layer show drying and the trend became significant after the 1980s. The dry trend in Northeast China is weak after early 1970s in near-surface layer but aggravates after latel 1970s in deep layers. In the mid-latitude zone, the inter-annual variation of spring soil is robust and shows no dry trend except in deep-layer after 1988.
This paper investigates a previously-ignored atmospheric circulation anomaly-di- pole structure anomaly in the arctic atmosphere, and its relationship with the winter sea ice mo- tion, based on analyses of the International Arctic Buoy Programme Data (1979―1998) and datasets from the National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) for the period of 1960―2002. The dipole structure anomaly is the second-leading mode of EOF of monthly mean SLP north of 70°N during the winter season (Oct.―Mar.), which accounts for 13% of the variance. One of its two anomaly centers is over the Canadian Archipelago; the other is situated over northern Eurasia and the Siberian marginal seas. Due to the dipole structure anomaly’s strong meridionality, it becomes an important mechanism to drive both anomalous sea ice export out of the Arctic Basin and cold air outbreaks into the Barents Sea, the Nordic Seas and northern Europe.
WU Bingyi1, ZHANG Renhe1 & WANG Jia2 1. Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences, Beijing 100081, China
The analysis of 43 years of NCEP-NCAR reanalysis data and station observations reveals the connections between tropospheric temperature variations and the weakening of the Indian summer monsoon circulation. The Indian summer monsoon variation is strongly linked to tropospheric temperature over East Asia, showing significant positive correlations of mean tropospheric temperature with all-Indian summer rainfall and the monsoon circulation intensity. The result shows that Indian summer monsoon circulation underwent two weakening processes in recent decades. The first occurred in circa the mid-1960s, and the other occurred in circa the late 1970s. The finding indicates that the mean tropospheric temperature may play a crucial role in the weakening of the Indian summer monsoon intensity via changing land-sea thermal contrast. The role of the tropospheric temperature contrast between East Asia and the tropical area from the eastern Indian Ocean to the tropical western Pacific is to weaken the Indian summer monsoon circulation.
An interdecadal shift in summer (June―August) sea surface temperature (SST) variations during the period of 1968―2002 was identified in the late 1980s, which is characterized by a phase alternating from negative to positive phases of the leading mode of the empirical orthogonal function (EOF) analysis of the summer monthly mean SST in the Pacific domain 100°―180°E and 0°―40°N, accounting for 30.5% of the total variance. During the period of 1968―1987, the leading mode with a mean negative phase state (mean standard deviation = ?0.586) controlled SST variability in the western North Pacific. Correspondingly, negative SST anomalies occupied the western North Pacific south of Japan and Chinese marginal seas. During the period of 1988―2002, the leading mode shifted to its strong positive polarity (mean standard deviation = 0.781), thus positive SST anomalies appeared in the western North Pacific. Accompanied by the interdecadal shift in summer mean SST, summer mean rainfall increased in southern and southeastern China during the late period, particularly in southeastern China where increase in summer mean rainfall exceeded 40 mm, at the 0.05 significance level.
