With its wind and precipitation patterns, the South Asian Monsoon influences the lives of several billion people. Recent studies indicate that its drivers are more complex than previously assumed. Scientists from the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel have now published a reconstruction of precipitation over the eastern Indian Ocean over the past one million years in the international journal Nature Communications. It points to connections with controlling processes in the southern hemisphere that have received little attention so far.
With its wind and precipitation patterns, the South Asian Monsoon influences the lives of several billion people. Recent studies indicate that its drivers are more complex than previously assumed. Scientists from the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel have now published a reconstruction of precipitation over the eastern Indian Ocean over the past one million years in the international journal Nature Communications. It points to connections with controlling processes in the southern hemisphere that have received little attention so far.
Months of heavy rainfall followed by half a year of drought - the South Asian Monsoon with its seasonally changing rainfall and wind directions has always strongly influenced the lives of people around the Indian Ocean. It is of crucial importance for agriculture and thus the food supply of several billion people. At the same time, floods and landslides in densely populated areas can be catastrophic.
But how exactly does this important climate system work? And how will it change in response to future global warming? "Even the best coupled ocean-atmosphere models still have problems to simulate the precipitation of the South Asian Monsoon," says lead author Dr. Daniel Gebregiorgis from the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, who is now working at Georgia State University in Atlanta (Georgia, USA). Together with colleagues from Kiel and the USA, he investigated new climate archives of the history of the South Asian Monsoon, which point to connections and monsoon drivers in the southern hemisphere that have previously received little attention. The study has been published today in the international journal Nature Communications.
Read more at Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel (GEOMAR)
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