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Mechanistic understanding of the summer precipitation and recent wetting trend over Northwest China and Mongolia
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  • Yi Ming,
  • Wenhao Dong,
  • Yi Deng,
  • Yongkun Xie,
  • Zhaoyi Shen,
  • Jianping Huang
Yi Ming
Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Wenhao Dong
NOAA/Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory
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Yi Deng
Georgia Institute of Technology
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Yongkun Xie
Lanzhou University
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Zhaoyi Shen
California Institute of Technology
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Jianping Huang
Lanzhou University
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Abstract

The arid region of Northwest China and Mongolia (NCM) receives most of the precipitation in the summer. The need for a better understanding of the synoptic-scale mechanism responsible for precipitation formation is accentuated by the recent wetting trend and its implications for future hydroclimate change. By conducting a hierarchical clustering analysis on an observationally-based daily precipitation dataset, we show that there are three distinct precipitation patterns over NCM, one of which is associated with strong precipitation over the western part of the region and another over the eastern part. The corresponding large-scale circulation anomalies indicate that these strong precipitation events are triggered by the upper-tropospheric disturbances in the form of transient Rossby wave packets. Furthermore, the wetting trend is linked to more frequent strong precipitation events over the eastern NCM, suggesting that it may have been induced remotely by atmospheric circulation perturbations.
31 Aug 2023Submitted to ESS Open Archive
11 Sep 2023Published in ESS Open Archive