NOAA/WDS Paleoclimatology - D'Arrigo - Muna, Sulawesi - TEGR - ITRDB INDO005

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.

亚洲季风系统影响全球超半数人口，然而其复杂时空变率背后的动力机制尚未被充分认知，难以对其行为开展模拟与预测，部分原因在于长期气候观测数据的不足。本研究构建了亚洲季风干旱图集（Monsoon Asia Drought Atlas, MADA），该数据集基于树轮年表网络，实现了过去千年亚洲季风区干旱与多雨事件的季节分辨率格点化空间重建。MADA不仅刻画了已知历史季风异常事件的时空细节，还揭示了此前未被发现的季风特大干旱的发生过程、强度等级与特征信号，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为近期季风变率提供了长期基准背景，而该背景是气候模拟、预测与归因研究不可或缺的关键基础。