Mechanisms for the Advanced Asian Summer Monsoon Onset since the Mid-to-Late 1990s

Abstract Understanding the variability and change of monsoon onset is of utmost importance for agriculture planning and water management. In the last three decades, the Asian summer monsoon onset (ASMO) has remarkably advanced, but the physical mechanisms underlying the change remain elusive. Since the overall ASMO occurs in May, this paper focuses on the change of mean fields in May and considers enhanced mean precipitation and monsoon westerly winds as signs of advanced ASMO. The results reveal that the advanced ASMO mainly represents a robust decadal shift in the mid-to-late 1990s, which is attributed to the mean state change in the Pacific basin characterized by a grand La Niña–like pattern. The La Niña–like mean state change controls the ASMO through the westward propagation of Rossby waves and its interaction with the asymmetric background mean states in the Indian Ocean and western Pacific, which intensifies the Northern Hemispheric perturbations and westerly winds. Intriguingly, the abrupt decadal shifts of monsoon onset in the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal occur in 1999, in contrast to the South China Sea with a decadal shift in 1994. Numerical experiments with a coupled climate model demonstrate that the advanced monsoon onset in the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal is governed by the enhanced zonal sea surface temperature (SST) gradients in the equatorial Pacific, while that in the South China Sea is primarily determined by the abrupt SST warming near the Philippine Sea.