Quantifying the contribution of anthropogenic influence to the East Asian winter monsoon in 1960–2012

Hao, Xin; He, Shengping; Wang, Huijun; Han, Tingting

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-9903-2019

Articles | Volume 19, issue 15

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-9903-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-9903-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 19, issue 15

Research article

|

07 Aug 2019

Research article |

| 07 Aug 2019

Quantifying the contribution of anthropogenic influence to the East Asian winter monsoon in 1960–2012

Xin Hao, Shengping He, Huijun Wang, and Tingting Han

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Final revised paper (published on 07 Aug 2019)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 11 Feb 2019)
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Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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RC1: 'Major Revisions', Anonymous Referee #1, 15 Mar 2019
RC2: 'Review of “quantifying the contribution of anthropogenic influence to the East Asian winter monsoon in 1960-2012”', Anonymous Referee #2, 21 Mar 2019
- AC2: 'Response for the comments', Xin Hao, 10 May 2019
AC1: 'Response for the comments', Xin Hao, 10 May 2019

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Xin Hao on behalf of the Authors (23 May 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (25 May 2019) by Jianping Huang

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (25 May 2019)

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (27 Jun 2019)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

This paper explores the contribution of anthropogenic influence to the EAWM in the past decades, using the All-Hist and Nat-Hist experiments. They found that the weakening of EAWM in 1960-2012 is mainly attributed to the anthropogenic influence, especially in the frequency of weak EAWM occurrence. Their results are reliable, based on the good performance of the model in simulating EAWM. I suggest for publication after minor revision. The details are shown below:

1. As shown in Figure 2, the EAWM indices in the All-Hist runs during 1960-1970 disagree with the results from reanalysis data. However, the indices during 1970-2013 are closely related to that from reanalysis data. I think it may be due to the uncertainty of the NCEP dataset before 1970. To confirm the relationship, please check the performance of the EAWM indices in the All-Hist runs compared with JRA-55 reanalysis dataset.
2. Why the time series of the EAWM indices in the Nat-Hist runs are standardized by the climatology simulated in the All-Hist runs? Does it matter the number of the strong or weak EAWM events?
3. According to previous studies (Zhu et al. 2015; Wei et al. 2017...), climate-decadal variability (such as PDO) associated with SST is important for the change of East Asian summer monsoon and winter monsoon. This paper indicates that the anthropogenic influence may be the main factor for the weakening of EAWM in 1960-2013, so what is the contribution of climate decadal variability related to SST? Is it smaller than the anthropogenic influence?
Reference:
Zhu Y, Wang H, Ma J, Wang T, Sun J. 2015. Contribution of the phase transition of Pacific Decadal Oscillation to the late 1990s’ shift in east china summer rainfall. J. Geophys. Res. 120:8817–8827.
Wei Y, Yu H, Huang J, He Y, Yang B, Guan X, Liu X (2017) Comparison of the Pacifc Decadal Oscillation in climate model simulations and observations. Int J Climatol. https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.5355
4. Line 17, “… monsoon can be greatly influenced …” can be changed to “… monsoon is greatly influenced …”.
5. Lines 186-188, “Meanwhile, in the high-level troposphere, … over the high-latitude regions under the anthropogenic influence”; Line 195, “ a decrease of SLP in the mid-latitude East Asia”. I suggest that more details should be provided in these descriptions.
6. Line 204, “Interestingly, the two simulated EAWM indices …”. “Interestingly” is redundant.
7. Line 238, “the interannual and interdecadal variation of the EAWMI_HGT…”. The “variation” should be “variations”.
8. Line 489, “… and 850 wind …” should be “… and 850 hPa wind …”.

Hide

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (11 Jul 2019) by Jianping Huang

Referee #3
This paper explores the contribution of anthropogenic influence to the EAWM in the past decades, using the All-Hist and Nat-Hist experiments. They found that the weakening of EAWM in 1960-2012 is mainly attributed to the anthropogenic influence, especially in the frequency of weak EAWM occurrence. Their results are reliable, based on the good performance of the model in simulating EAWM. I suggest for publication after minor revision. The details are shown below:

1. As shown in Figure 2, the EAWM indices in the All-Hist runs during 1960-1970 disagree with the results from reanalysis data. However, the indices during 1970-2013 are closely related to that from reanalysis data. I think it may be due to the uncertainty of the NCEP dataset before 1970. To confirm the relationship, please check the performance of the EAWM indices in the All-Hist runs compared with JRA-55 reanalysis dataset.
2. Why the time series of the EAWM indices in the Nat-Hist runs are standardized by the climatology simulated in the All-Hist runs? Does it matter the number of the strong or weak EAWM events?
3. According to previous studies (Zhu et al. 2015; Wei et al. 2017...), climate-decadal variability (such as PDO) associated with SST is important for the change of East Asian summer monsoon and winter monsoon. This paper indicates that the anthropogenic influence may be the main factor for the weakening of EAWM in 1960-2013, so what is the contribution of climate decadal variability related to SST? Is it smaller than the anthropogenic influence?
Reference:
Zhu Y, Wang H, Ma J, Wang T, Sun J. 2015. Contribution of the phase transition of Pacific Decadal Oscillation to the late 1990s’ shift in east china summer rainfall. J. Geophys. Res. 120:8817–8827.
Wei Y, Yu H, Huang J, He Y, Yang B, Guan X, Liu X (2017) Comparison of the Pacifc Decadal Oscillation in climate model simulations and observations. Int J Climatol. https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.5355
4. Line 17, “… monsoon can be greatly influenced …” can be changed to “… monsoon is greatly influenced …”.
5. Lines 186-188, “Meanwhile, in the high-level troposphere, … over the high-latitude regions under the anthropogenic influence”; Line 195, “ a decrease of SLP in the mid-latitude East Asia”. I suggest that more details should be provided in these descriptions.
6. Line 204, “Interestingly, the two simulated EAWM indices …”. “Interestingly” is redundant.
7. Line 238, “the interannual and interdecadal variation of the EAWMI_HGT…”. The “variation” should be “variations”.
8. Line 489, “… and 850 wind …” should be “… and 850 hPa wind …”.

Hide

AR by Xin Hao on behalf of the Authors (13 Jul 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (16 Jul 2019) by Jianping Huang

AR by Xin Hao on behalf of the Authors (16 Jul 2019) Author's response Manuscript

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Short summary

The East Asian winter monsoon (EAWM) can be greatly influenced by many factors that can be classified as anthropogenic forcing and natural forcing. Our results show that the increasing anthropogenic emissions in the past decades may have contributed to the weakening of the EAWM, the frequency of occurrence of strong EAWM may have decreased by 45 % due to the anthropogenic forcing, and the anthropogenic forcing is a dominant contributor to the occurrence of a weak EAWM.