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Sensible heating over Asian plateaus is comparable to ocean forcing in modulating China’s interdecadal rainfall patterns
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DOI：10.1016/j.accre.2026.06.003.png)
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Abstract
En 中文
Interdecadal variability in China’s summer rainfall is commonly attributed to ocean forcing, but the role of upstream land heating across the Tibetan, Iranian, and Mongolian Plateaus remains unclear. Here we refer to these regions collectively as the Asian plateaus and show that sensible heating anomalies over the Asian plateaus form a coordinated upstream land-forcing system on interdecadal timescales. During 1979–2018, summer sensible heat weakened over the Tibetan Plateau but strengthened over the Iranian and Mongolian Plateaus, forming a tripolar mode that shifted in the late 1990s and was tightly linked to a rainfall tripole over China. This thermal contrast was associated with reduced lower-tropospheric thickness over the Tibetan Plateau, enhanced thickness over the Iranian and Mongolian Plateaus, a deep anticyclonic anomaly over Mongolia–Northeast Asia, upper-level jet and Rossby wave source adjustments, and downstream moisture divergence and convergence anomalies over China. A structural equation model further showed that plateau sensible heating exerted a total effect (0.52) on summer rainfall variability that was slightly larger than that (0.42) of the major sea surface temperature modes considered here. These results identify surface heating over the Asian plateaus as a major and previously underappreciated driver of China’s interdecadal hydroclimate, advancing interpretation beyond an ocean-centered framework and highlighting the need to consider land–atmosphere and ocean–atmosphere forcing together for understanding and predicting long-term rainfall variability over China.
Keywords:
Asian plateaus
Sensible heat flux
Interdecadal variability
China’s summer precipitation
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