Insights from a joint analysis of Indian and Chinese monsoon rainfall data

Abstract

Monsoon rainfall is of great importance for agricultural production in both China and India. Understanding the features of the Indian and Chinese monsoon rainfall and its long term predictability is a challenge for research. In this paper Principal Component Analysis (PCA) method was adopted to analyze Indian monsoon and Chinese monsoon separately as well as jointly during the period 1951 to 2003. The common structure of Indian monsoon and Chinese monsoon rainfall data was explored, and its correlation with large scale climate indices and thus the possibility of prediction were analyzed. The joint PCA results gives a clearer correlation map between Chinese monsoon rainfall and Indian monsoon rainfall. The common rainfall structure presents a significant teleconnection to Sea Surface Temperature anomaly (SSTa), moisture transport and other climate indices. Specifically, our result shows that Northern China would garner less rainfall when whole Indian rainfall is below normal, and with cold SSTa over the Indonesia region more rainfall would be distributed over India and Southern China. The result also shows that SSTa in the previous winter months could be a good indicator for the summer monsoon rainfall in China. © Author(s) 2011.