NOAA/WDS Paleoclimatology - Reconstructed Asian Summer Precipitation (RAP) 1470-2013 CE

Sparse long-term Asian monsoon (AM) records have limited our ability to understand and accurately model low-frequency AM variability. Here we present a gridded 544-year (from AD 1470 to 2013) Reconstructed Asian summer Precipitation (RAP) dataset by weighted merging two complementary proxies including 453 tree ring width chronologies and 71 historical documentary records. The RAP dataset provides substantially improved data quality compared with single proxy-type reconstructions. Skillful reconstructions are obtained in East and North China, northern India and Pakistan, Indochina Peninsula, mid-latitude Asia, Maritime Continent, and southern Japan. The RAP faithfully illustrates large-scale regional rainfall variability but has more uncertainties in representing small-scale local rainfall anomalies. The RAP reproduces realistic climatology and captures well the year-to-year rainfall variability averaged over monsoon Asia, arid central Asia, and entire Asia during the 20th century. It also shows a general agreement with other proxies (speleothems and ice cores) during the period of 1470-1920. The RAP captures the remarkably abrupt change during the 1600s recorded in the upwelling proxy over the Arabian Sea. Four major modes of variability of the Asian summer precipitation are identified with the long record of RAP, including a biennial El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) mode, a low-frequency ENSO mode, a central Pacific El Nino-like decadal mode, and an interdecadal mode. In sum, the RAP provides a valuable dataset for study of the large-scale Asian summer precipitation variability, especially the decadal-centennial variability that are caused by the external forcing and internal feedback processes within the Earth climate system.