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The Asian summer monsoon (ASM) is a vast climate system, whose variability is critical to the livelihoods of billions of people across the Asian continent. During the past half-century, much progress has been made in understanding variations on a wide range of timescales, yet several significant issues remain unresolved. Of note are two long-standing problems concerning orbital-scale variations of the ASM. (1) Chinese loess magnetic susceptibility records show a persistent glacial-interglacial dominated ~100 kyr (thousand years) periodicity, while the cave oxygen-isotope (δ18O) records reveal periodicity in an almost pure precession band (~20 kyr periodicity)—the "Chinese 100 kyr problem". (2) ASM records from the Arabian Sea and other oceans surrounding the Asian continent show a significant lag of 8–10 kyr to Northern Hemisphere summer insolation (NHSI), whereas the Asian cave δ18O records follow NHSI without a significant lag—a discrepancy termed the "sea-land precession-phase paradox". How can we reconcile these differences? Recent and more refined model simulations now provide spatial patterns of rainfall and wind across the precession cycle, revealing distinct regional divergences in the ASM domain, which can well explain a large portion of the disparities between the loess, marine, and cave proxy records. Overall, we also find that the loess, marine, and cave records are indeed complementary rather than incompatible, with each record preferentially describing a certain aspect of ASM dynamics. Our study provides new insight into the understanding of different hydroclimatic proxies and largely reconciles the "Chinese 100 kyr problem" and "sea-land precession-phase paradox". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Widely distributed proxy records show that there were out-of-phase behaviors of moisture change between arid central Asia (ACA) and monsoonal northern China during the Little Ice Age (LIA) and Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA). We examined spatial pattern differences between the MCA and LIA to identify contrasting patterns of summer precipitation variability, and to diagnose explanatory mechanisms through the analysis of a 1000-year global climate model simulation driven by natural and anthropogenic forcing. The results show that the model was able to roughly produce the general features of MCA-LIA hydroclimatic spatial differences between monsoonal northern China and ACA, with a relatively wet MCA found in monsoonal northern China and a relatively dry MCA found in ACA. A further analysis of associated circulations shows that increased summer precipitation in monsoonal northern China was caused by the strengthening of summer monsoon, while the decline in summer precipitation in ACA was caused by an anomalous northward displacement of the subtropical westerly jet stream. Our analyses suggest that both effective solar forcing and El-Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) may produce these contrasting patterns of precipitation between monsoonal northern China and ACA. Due to a change in the probability of ENSO phases at the centennial time scale found in our experiments may be attributed to solar irradiances, higher effective solar irradiances during the MCA relative to those of the LIA may have been the ultimate forcing mechanism for the simulated precipitation differences between the MCA and LIA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Page 452, "8.4 significant at the 0.01 level" → It should be "0.84 significant at the 0.01 level". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extent to which climate variability in Central Asia is causally linked to large-scale changes in the Asian monsoon on varying timescales remains a longstanding question. Here we present precisely dated high-resolution speleothem oxygen-carbon isotope and trace element records of Central Asia's hydroclimate variability from Tonnel'naya cave, Uzbekistan, and Kesang cave, western China. On orbital timescales, the supra-regional climate variance, inferred from our oxygen isotope records, exhibits a precessional rhythm, punctuated by millennial-scale abrupt climate events, suggesting a close coupling with the Asian monsoon. However, the local hydroclimatic variability at both cave sites, inferred from carbon isotope and trace element records, shows climate variations that are distinctly different from their supra-regional modes. Particularly, hydroclimatic changes in both Tonnel'naya and Kesang areas during the Holocene lag behind the supra-regional climate variability by several thousand years. These observations may reconcile the apparent out-of-phase hydroclimatic variability, inferred from the Holocene lake proxy records, between Westerly Central Asia and Monsoon Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]