IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/nat/nature/v463y2010i7278d10.1038_nature08707.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Dominant control of the South Asian monsoon by orographic insulation versus plateau heating

Author

Listed:
  • William R. Boos

    (Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences,)

  • Zhiming Kuang

    (Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences,
    School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA)

Abstract

Monsoon from the mountains Heat emitted from the Tibetan plateau as dry heat and water vapour has long been assumed to be the main driver of the South Asian summer monsoon, but new work suggests that in fact it is the neighbouring mountains that are the major influence. William Boos and Zhiming Kuang use an atmospheric model to show that flattening the Tibetan plateau has little effect on the monsoon, so long as the Himalayas and surrounding mountain ranges remain. The plateau does boost rainfall locally along its southern edge, but it is the build-up of hot, moist air over India, insulated from colder, drier air by the Himalayas, that drives large-scale monsoon circulation.

Suggested Citation

  • William R. Boos & Zhiming Kuang, 2010. "Dominant control of the South Asian monsoon by orographic insulation versus plateau heating," Nature, Nature, vol. 463(7278), pages 218-222, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:nat:nature:v:463:y:2010:i:7278:d:10.1038_nature08707
    DOI: 10.1038/nature08707
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature08707
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1038/nature08707?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Siddique Ullah & Adnan Ahmad Tahir & Tahir Ali Akbar & Quazi K. Hassan & Ashraf Dewan & Asim Jahangir Khan & Mudassir Khan, 2019. "Remote Sensing-Based Quantification of the Relationships between Land Use Land Cover Changes and Surface Temperature over the Lower Himalayan Region," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 11(19), pages 1-16, October.
    2. Bidyut Bikash Goswami & Soon-Il An & Raghu Murtugudde, 2022. "Role of the Tibetan plateau glaciers in the Asian summer monsoon," Climatic Change, Springer, vol. 173(3), pages 1-16, August.
    3. Ruimin Yang & Liping Zhu & Junbo Wang & Jianting Ju & Qingfeng Ma & Falko Turner & Yun Guo, 2017. "Spatiotemporal variations in volume of closed lakes on the Tibetan Plateau and their climatic responses from 1976 to 2013," Climatic Change, Springer, vol. 140(3), pages 621-633, February.
    4. Xuan Liu & Mingxiang Yang & Feng Zhou & Fan Wen & Xiaotan Zhang & Chao Gao & Hejia Wang & Ningpeng Dong, 2024. "Understanding the Dry-to-Wet Transition of Summer Precipitation over the Three-Rivers Headwater Region: Atmospheric Circulation Mechanisms," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 16(15), pages 1-16, July.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nat:nature:v:463:y:2010:i:7278:d:10.1038_nature08707. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.nature.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.