Role of thermal and dynamical subdaily perturbations over the Tibetan Plateau in 30-day extended-range forecast of East Asian precipitation in early summer

• Published in: NPJ climate and atmospheric science 2025-02, Vol.8 (1), p.40-15, Article 40
• Main Authors: He, Bian, He, Xinyu, Liu, Yimin, Wu, Guoxiong, Bao, Qing, Hu, Wenting, Sheng, Chen, Feng, Shijian
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 704/106/35; 704/106/694/1108; Atmospheric Protection/Air Quality Control/Air Pollution; Atmospheric Sciences; Climate Change/Climate Change Impacts; Climatology; Earth and Environmental Science; Earth Sciences; Experiments; Extreme values; Heat; Heat transmission; Heating; Influence; Monsoons; Perturbation; Precipitation; Predictions; Summer; Thermodynamics; Topography; Vorticity; Water vapor; Weather forecasting; Wind
• ISSN: 2397-3722; 2397-3722
• DOI: 10.1038/s41612-025-00931-2

The influence of the thermodynamic forcing of the Tibetan Plateau (TP) on the Asian summer monsoon remains controversial because the role of elevated heating across the TP remains unclear at multiple time scales. At the extended-range scale, the boundary forcing is more important than the initial field in the forecast process. In this study, we investigated the role of subdaily thermodynamic forcing across the TP in generating 30-day predictions of precipitation in East Asia by conducting a series of hindcast experiments. The surface potential vorticity forcing was used to identify typical years when the TP forcings were extremely strong or weak. The results indicated that the subdaily thermal forcing of the TP was very important for improving the East Asian precipitation forecast accuracy, especially for predictions longer than 14 days in June 2022, when diffusion heating is very strong and can develop over the TP. In such a case, the corrected TP heating could not only correct for low-level water vapor transport but also modular uplevel circulation, which could propagate downstream, thus favoring the correct prediction of precipitation over East Asia. However, in the other cases, the individual influences of thermal perturbations across the TP are not the only important factors. These findings reveal ways to improve the extended-range forecast skill over East Asia.