Impact of Developing ENSO on Tibetan Plateau Summer Rainfall

Abstract The year-to-year variations of Tibetan Plateau (TP) summer rainfall have tremendous climate impacts on the adjoining and even global climate, attracting extensive research attention in recent decades to understand the underlying mechanism. In this study, we investigate an open question of how El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) influences the TP precipitation. We show that the developing ENSO has significant impacts on the summer rainfall over the southwestern TP (SWTP), which is the second EOF mode of the interannual variability of summer rainfall over the TP. The moisture budget indicates that both the suppressed vertical motion and the deficit of moisture contribute to the reduction of SWTP rainfall during El Niño’s developing summer, with the former contribution 4 times larger than the latter. Moist static energy analyses indicate that the anomalous advection of climatological moist enthalpy by anomalous zonal wind is responsible for the anomalous descending motions over the SWTP. The El Niño–related southward displacements of the South Asian high and the upper-level cyclonic anomalies over the west of TP stimulated by the suppressed Indian summer monsoon precipitation are two key processes dominating the anomalous zonal moist enthalpy advection over SWTP. Meanwhile, the India–Burma monsoon trough is strengthened during El Niño developing summer, which prevents the advection of water vapor into the SWTP, and thus contributes to the deficit of summer SWTP rainfall. Our results help to understand the complicated ENSO-related air–sea interaction responsible for the variability of TP precipitation and have implications for seasonal prediction of the TP climate.