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Recent changes in the spatio-temporal characteristics of monsoon intraseasonal oscillations

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Abstract

Monsoon intraseasonal oscillations (MISOs) define a significant proportion of intraseasonal variability of the Indian summer monsoon. In the backdrop of increasing temperatures related to global warming, it is expected that MISOs would exhibit more spatio-temporal variability, prompting an increased frequency of extreme events. Hence, the present study investigates the observed changes in the characteristics of long (≥ 7 days) and short (< 7 days) active and break spells in the early twenty-first century (2001–2019) in comparison with the late twentieth century (1982–2000).

In the recent period, a decreased (increased) frequency of the short (long) active/break spells along with a strengthening of short spells has been noticed. An east–west asymmetry in the spatial distribution of rainfall is further noted with western India experiencing intensified (weakened) active (break) spells. Contrariwise, the central and eastern parts of the country witness weakening (intensification) of active (break) spell in the early twenty-first century. A comprehensive composite investigation of various dynamical and thermodynamical parameters reveals an increase in the strength of low-level winds in the Arabian Sea, thereby increasing the moisture convergence and instability over the western Indian region and the nearby oceanic regions, resulting in the observed east–west asymmetry in the rainfall spatial distribution. Increased intensity of the equatorial Madden–Julian oscillation and its coupling with the northward propagating MISO spells seem to play a pivotal role in lengthening the active/break spells. It is speculated that such changes are triggered by the amplified temperatures over the global oceans in the recent period.

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Data availability

The datasets used for this study are available freely from (i) the SST (Reynolds et al. 2007) and OLR (Gruber and Kruger 1984) datasets from NOAA/OAR/ESRL PSD, Boulder, Colorado, USA (available at http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/), (ii) the daily IMD rainfall dataset from http://www.imdpune.gov.in/Clim_Pred_LRF_New/Grided_Data_Download.html (Pai et al. 2014), and (iii) atmospheric fields from the National Center for Environmental Prediction/National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCEP/NCAR) reanalysis datasets https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.ncep.reanalysis.html (Kalnay et al. 1996).

Code availability

The codes used for the study will be available upon request from the corresponding author.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Director, IITM, for all the support to carry out this work. IITM is supported by the Ministry of Earth Sciences, Government of India. We would like to acknowledge all the observational data freely available from NCEP/NCAR, NOAA, and IMD. The free plotting software, GrADS (available at http://iges.org/grads/) and GRACE, and free writing assistant Grammarly are duly acknowledged. The authors wish to acknowledge the constructive comments from the reviewer and editor on the earlier version of the manuscript.

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  1. Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Ministry of Earth Sciences, Pune, India

    Susmitha Joseph, A. K. Sahai, R. Chattopadhyay & Manpreet Kaur

  2. Cochin University of Science and Technology, Kochi, Kerala, India

    Hindhiya Shabu

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  1. Susmitha Joseph
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection, and analysis were performed by SJ and HS. The first draft of the manuscript was written by SJ, and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Susmitha Joseph.

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Joseph, S., Sahai, A.K., Shabu, H. et al. Recent changes in the spatio-temporal characteristics of monsoon intraseasonal oscillations. Theor Appl Climatol 147, 251–264 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-021-03830-7

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