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Springtime rainfall, accounting for 25-40% of the annual rainfall in southern China, exerts great agricultural and socioeconomic impacts on the region. In the recent decades, southern China has experienced a significant declining trend of precipitation in boreal spring. Meanwhile, precipitation has increased over the South China Sea and the Philippine Sea (SCS-PhS). This paper presents observational and modeling evidences suggesting that the intensified latent heating released by the convection over SCS-PhS leads to suppressed springtime rainfall over southern China. Moisture budget analysis indicates that the drying trend over southern China is due mainly to weakened convergence of moisture flux, which is controlled by a heat-induced anomalous overturning circulation reinforced by the convection over SCS-PhS. Further idealized simulations support the feature that the heat-induced overturning circulation and its corresponding anomalous cyclone can be well established in several days under the spring mean flow condition. Thus, this rapid dynamic process is associated with both the intraseasonal-to-interannual variations and the long-term change of the springtime rainfall over southern China.

The Asian summer monsoon has great socioeconomic impacts. Understanding how the huge Tibetan and Iranian Plateaus affect the Asian summer monsoon is of great scientific value and has far-reaching significance for sustainable global development. One hypothesis considers the plateaus to be a shield for monsoon development in India by blocking cold-dry northerly intrusion into the tropics. Based on astronomical radiation analysis and numerical modeling, here we show that in winter the plateaus cannot block such a northerly intrusion; while in summer the daily solar radiation at the top of the atmosphere and at the surface, and the surface potential temperature to the north of the Tibetan Plateau, are higher than their counterparts to its south, and such plateau shielding is not needed. By virtue of hydrological analysis, we show that the high energy near the surface required for continental monsoon development is maintained mainly by high water vapor content. Results based on potential vorticity-potential temperature diagnosis further demonstrate that it is the pumping of water vapor from sea to land due to the thermal effects of the plateaus that breeds the Asian continental monsoon.

The Asian summer monsoon affects more than sixty percent of the world's population; understanding its controlling factors is becoming increasingly important due to the expanding human influence on the environment and climate and the need to adapt to global climate change. Various mechanisms have been suggested; however, an overarching paradigm delineating the dominant factors for its generation and strength remains debated. Here we use observation data and numerical experiments to demonstrates that the Asian summer monsoon systems are controlled mainly by thermal forcing whereas large-scale orographically mechanical forcing is not essential: the South Asian monsoon south of 20°N by land-sea thermal contrast, its northern part by the thermal forcing of the Iranian Plateau, and the East Asian monsoon and the eastern part of the South Asian monsoon by the thermal forcing of the Tibetan Plateau.