An East Asian land-sea atmospheric heat source difference index and its relation to general circulation and summer rainfall over China

Using a monthly precipitation dataset of 160 stations over China and a daily and monthly National Centers for Environmental Prediction/National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCEP/NCAR) reanalysis dataset from 1961 to 2006, we here define an East Asian land-sea atmospheric heat source difference index ILSQD and investigate its relationship to summer rainfall in China and East Asian general circulation. The results show that ILSQD more closely reflects the anomalous variations in summer monsoon phenomena; in the high-index (HI) cases, the strong low-level southerlies over East China and the strong high-level westerlies over middle latitudes indicate an active summer monsoon, and vice versa in the low-index (LI) cases. This index also reflects summer rainfall anomalies over East China; in the HI (LI) cases rainfall increases (decreases) over North China and at the same time decreases (increases) over the mid-lower Yangtze River valley and the southern Yangtze River. Hence, ILSQD can be utilized as a summer monsoon index. There is also remarkable correlation between ILSQD in March and the following summer rainfall over the mid-lower Yangtze River valley. Finally, the Community Atmospheric Model Version 3.1 (CAM3.1) of NCAR is used to run numerical experiments, which verify that the anomalous summer precipitation in simulations is similar to that of diagnosis analysis based on the anomalous summer atmospheric heating forcing. Similarly, the atmospheric heating rate in March can force summer rainfall anomalies in the simulations just as observed in the data.