ClimaTea Journal Club

This week Marena Lin will be presenting on Day et al. (2015), "Coupling of South and East Asian Monsoon Precipitation in July-August." Her thoughts on this topic are:Monsoon rainfall forms the lifeblood of Asian agriculture-based economies, so understanding of dynamics underlying monsoonal precipitation can help in reducing economic and food insecurity. Day et al. (2015) identify inter-regional correlations in monthly-averaged July-August rainfall anomalies between the South Asian and East Asian Monsoon regions, using a high-resolution interpolated 57-year observational rainfall product, APHRODITE. They suggest that these might be explained by interannual changes in the strength of moisture transport from the Bay of Bengal to the Yangtze corridor, and their model results offer some support for this argument. This is a nice study that uses a relatively new data-set, and I'm interested in exploring how these results square with existing theories of monsoon precipitation.