See-saw relationship of the Holocene East Asian-Australian summer monsoon.
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 27666662.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/ncomms12929 and PMC identifier 5052686.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
The East Asian-Indonesian-Australian summer monsoon (EAIASM) links the Earth's hemispheres and provides a heat source that drives global circulation. At seasonal and inter-seasonal timescales, the summer monsoon of one hemisphere is linked via outflows from the winter monsoon of the opposing hemisphere. Long-term phase relationships between the East Asian summer monsoon (EASM) and the Indonesian-Australian summer monsoon (IASM) are poorly understood, raising questions of long-term adjustments to future greenhouse-triggered climate change and whether these changes could 'lock in' possible IASM and EASM phase relationships in a region dependent on monsoonal rainfall. Here we show that a newly developed nonlinear time series analysis technique allows confident identification of strong versus weak monsoon phases at millennial to sub-centennial timescales. We find a see-saw relationship over the last 9,000 years-with strong and weak monsoons opposingly phased and triggered by solar variations. Our results provide insights into centennial- to millennial-scale relationships within the wider EAIASM regime.