Large-scale circulation features in the tropical western Pacific and their representation in climate models

Abstract

Within the Western Pacific Monsoon (WPM) region the zonal component of the low-level winds tends to weaken and reverse from east to west during the peak monsoon season, which also marks a peak in rainfall. This study examines how well climate models can simulate these phenomena prior to evaluating their projections for later this century. While a seasonal wind reversal or weakening appears to be reasonably well simulated by most models over much of the WPM, the relationships between large-scale average winds and rainfall are not always well simulated. This allows us to discriminate among the models in order to see if this affects the projections. However, it so happens that this has relatively little effect, and the predominant signal is for an increase in rainfall with a weakening or negligible change to the low-level monsoon winds. These results indicate that the WPM climate will respond more to global scale drivers such as an increase in atmospheric water vapor content and a weakening of the global circulation, rather than to more regional changes such as an increase in the land/ocean temperature contrast. Copyright © 2012 by the American Geophysical Union.