The Spring Persistent Rains (SPR) in the areas to the south of middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River or over southeastern China (SEC) is a unique synoptic and climatic phenomenon in East Asia. This study reveals a possible mechanism responsible for the climatic cause of SPR formation through climatic mean data analysis and sensitive numerical model experiments. SEC is located at the down-stream of the southwesterly velocity center (SWVC) which lies on the southeastern flank of the Tibetan Plateau (TP). As a result, there are strong southwesterly wind velocity convergence and moisture con-vergence over SEC. This is the immediate climatic cause of SPR formation. In spring, the seasonal evolution of the southwesterly velocity consists with the surface sensible heating over southeastern TP, indicating that the formation of SPR is related to not only the southwesterly wind of mechanical de-flected flow of TP, but also the southwesterly wind of thermal-forced cyclonic low circulation. Sensitive numerical experiments demonstrate that, without TP, both SWVC and the SPR rain belt will disappear. The southwesterly wind velocity increases almost linearly with the amount of the total diabatic heating with TP rising. Therefore, SWVC is the result of the mechanical forcing and thermal forcing of TP. All these strongly suggest that the presence of TP plays a primary role in the climatic formation of SPR.
WAN RiJin1,2,3 & WU GuoXiong1 1 State Key Laboratory of Numerical Modeling for Atmospheric Sciences and Geophysical Fluid Mechanicals (LASG), Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, China
Various paleoclimate records have shown that the Asian monsoon was punctuated by numerous suborbital time-scale events, and these events were coeval with those that happened in the North Atlantic. This study investigates the Asian summer monsoon responses to the Atlantic Ocean forcing by applying an additional freshwater flux into the North Atlantic. The simulated results indicate that the cold North Atlantic and warm South Atlantic induced by the weakened Atlantic thermohaline circulation （THC） due to the freshwater flux lead to significantly suppressed Asian summer monsoon. The authors analyzed the detailed processes of the Atlantic Ocean forcing on the Asian summer monsoon, and found that the atmospheric teleconnection in the eastern and central North Pacific and the atmosphere-ocean interaction in the tropical North Pacific play the most crucial role. Enhanced precipitation in the subtropical North Pacific extends the effects of Atlantic Ocean forcing from the eastern Pacific into the western Pacific, and the atmosphere-ocean interaction in the tropical Pacific and Indian Ocean intensifies the circulation and precipitation anomalies in the Pacific and East Asia.
Conditional nonlinear optimal perturbation (CNOP),which is a natural extension of singular vector (SV) into the nonlinear regime,is applied to ensemble prediction study by using a quasi-geostrophic model under the perfect model assumption. SVs and CNOPs have been utilized to generate the initial pertur-bations for ensemble prediction experiments. The results are compared for forecast lengths of up to 14 d. It is found that the forecast skill of samples,in which the first SV is replaced by CNOP,is com-paratively higher than that of samples composed of only SVs in the medium range (day 6―day 14). This conclusion is valid under the condition that analysis error is a kind of fast-growing ones regardless of its magnitude,whose nonlinear growth is faster than that of SV in the later part of the forecast. Fur-thermore,similarity index and empirical orthogonal function (EOF) analysis are performed to explain the above numerical results.
Researches on nonlinear atmospheric dynamics in China (1999-2002) are briefly surveyed. This review includes the major achievements in the following branches of nonlinear dynamics: nonlinear stability theory, nonlinear blocking dynamics, 3D spiral structure in the atmosphere, traveling wave solution of the nonlinear evolution equation, numerical predictability in a chaotic system, and global analysis of climate dynamics. Some applications of nonlinear methods such as hierarchy structure of climate and scaling invariance, the spatial-temporal series predictive method, the nonlinear inverse problem, and a new difference scheme with multi-time Ievels are also introduced.
A dataset of surface current vectors with error estimate from 1999 to 2007 is derived from the trajectories of the Array for Real-time Geostrophic Oceanography (Argo) drifting on surface over the global ocean. The error of the estimated surface currents is about 4.7 cm s-1 which is equivalent to the accuracy of the currents determined from the surface drifters. Geographically, the Argo-derived surface currents can fill many gaps left by the Global Drifter Program due to the greater number of floats, and can provide a complementary in situ observational system for monitoring global ocean surface currents. The surface currents from the Argo floats are compared with the surface drifter-derived currents and the Tropical Atmosphere Ocean program (TAO) measurements. The comparisons show good agreement for both the current amplitude and the direction of surface currents. Results indicate the feasibility of obtaining ocean surface currents from the Argo array and of combining the surface currents from Argo and the ocean surface drifters for in situ mapping of the global surface currents. The authors also make the dataset available to users of interest for many types of applications.
