NOAA/WDS Paleoclimatology - Wright - Cilan - CHOB - ITRDB TW001

The Asian monsoon system affects more than half of humanity worldwide, yet the dynamical processes that govern its complex spatiotemporal variability are not sufficiently understood to model and predict its behavior, due in part to inadequate long-term climate observations. Here we present the Monsoon Asia Drought Atlas (MADA), a seasonally resolved gridded spatial reconstruction of Asian monsoon drought and pluvials over the past millennium, derived from a network of tree-ring chronologies. MADA provides the spatiotemporal details of known historic monsoon failures and reveals the occurrence, severity, and fingerprint of previously unknown monsoon megadroughts and their close linkages to large-scale patterns of tropical Indo-Pacific sea surface temperatures. MADA thus provides a long-term context for recent monsoon variability that is critically needed for climate modeling, prediction, and attribution.

亚洲季风系统影响着全球逾半数人口，但其复杂时空变率背后的动力过程尚未得到充分认知，难以对其演化规律进行模拟与预测，这在一定程度上源于长期气候观测资料的匮乏。本研究构建了亚洲季风干旱图集（Monsoon Asia Drought Atlas, MADA），该数据集基于树木年轮年表网络，对过去千年间亚洲季风区的干旱与多雨事件开展了逐季节解析的网格化空间重建。MADA不仅还原了已知历史季风失效事件的时空细节，还揭示了此前未被发现的季风特大干旱事件的发生过程、强度特征与典型信号，并阐明了其与热带印度洋-太平洋海表温度大尺度模态的紧密关联。因此，MADA为近期季风变率研究提供了长期基准背景，这正是气候模拟、预测与归因研究所亟需的核心支撑。