Combined Impacts of Warm Central Equatorial Pacific Sea Surface Temperatures and Anthropogenic Warming on the 2019 Sever
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• Original Paper •
Combined Impacts of Warm Central Equatorial Pacific Sea Surface Temperatures and Anthropogenic Warming on the 2019 Severe Drought in East China Shuangmei MA1, Congwen ZHU*1, and Juan LIU2 1State
Key Laboratory of Severe Weather (LASW) and Institute of Climate System, Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences, Beijing 100081, China
2Meteorological
Service Center of Zhejiang, Hangzhou 310016, China
(Received 16 April 2020; revised 23 July 2020; accepted 24 July 2020) ABSTRACT A severe drought occurred in East China (EC) from August to October 2019 against a background of long-term significant warming and caused widespread impacts on agriculture and society, emphasizing the urgent need to understand the mechanism responsible for this drought and its linkage to global warming. Our results show that the warm central equatorial Pacific (CEP) sea surface temperature (SST) and anthropogenic warming were possibly responsible for this drought event. The warm CEP SST anomaly resulted in an anomalous cyclone over the western North Pacific, where enhanced northerly winds in the northwestern sector led to decreased water vapor transport from the South China Sea and enhanced descending air motion, preventing local convection and favoring a precipitation deficiency over EC. Model simulations in the Community Earth System Model Large Ensemble Project confirmed the physical connection between the warm CEP SST anomaly and the drought in EC. The extremely warm CEP SST from August to October 2019, which was largely the result of natural internal variability, played a crucial role in the simultaneous severe drought in EC. The model simulations showed that anthropogenic warming has greatly increased the frequency of extreme droughts in EC. They indicated an approximate twofold increase in extremely low rainfall events, high temperature events, and concurrently dry and hot events analogous to the event in 2019. Therefore, the persistent severe drought over EC in 2019 can be attributed to the combined impacts of warm CEP SST and anthropogenic warming. Key words: drought, East China, central equatorial Pacific, SST, global warming, model simulations Citation: Ma, S. M., C. W. Zhu, and J. Liu, 2020: Combined impacts of warm central equatorial Pacific sea surface temperatures and anthropogenic warming on the 2019 severe drought in East China. Adv. Atmos. Sci., 37(11), 1149−1163, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00376-020-0077-8. Article Highlights:
• In August−October 2019, East China experienced severe drought, with the lowest precipitation and highest temperature since 1960.
• Drought was naturally driven by the extremely warm CEP SST. • Global warming has enhanced the probability of severe drought.
1. Introduction Large-scale persistent drought can cause significant water shortages, economic losses, and adverse social consequences, with far-reaching impacts on the increasingly globalized world (Sternberg, 2011). Over the past decade, record-breaking extreme drought events have occurred more frequently (Le
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