The Impact of Hengduan Mountains Formation on the Regional Monsoon Climate and Extreme Precipitation

The Hengudan Mountains, located at the south-eastern fringe of the Tibetan Plateau, reveal exceptionally high biodiversity. It is believed that this feature is linked to past complex interactions between climate, land surface dynamics and plate tectonics in this region. Contemporary topography was formed by plate tectonics, causing surface uplift, and spatially heterogeneous erosion, which shaped the deep river valleys. The non-hydrostatic regional climate model COSMO is applied to study the impact of surface uplift and river incision. Decades-long simulations at horizontal resolutions of 12 and 4.4 km grid spacing are performed. To study the impact of local topography on climate, we consider two idealized experiments with terrains deviating from the present-day topography: In the first experiment, we reduce the topography in a spatially non-uniform way. This altered topography reflects a past potential state of the Hengduan Mountains. In the second experiment, we remove the deep valleys by applying an envelope topography to quantify the effects of deep valleys on the local climate. Both experiments assume that that the large-scale (continental) climate did not change, i.e., the experiments are driven by large-scale reanalysis data. Preliminary results from the coarse-resolution 12 km COSMO simulation indicate that the uplift of the Hengduan Mountains has a strong impact on the summer monsoon over South Asia caused by circulation changes around the uplifted region. The uplift of the Hengduan Mountains strengthens the westerly wind anomalies from the ocean in South Asia and markedly intensifies the precipitation in Indochina and southwestern China. Besides, the cyclonic circulation in the Bay of Bengal extends eastward, indicating an intensification of the East Asian summer monsoon. The diabatic heating in the eastern Tibetan Plateau increases in response to the regional uplift and it is coupled with the increased precipitation in summer through moist processes. On the contrary, the uplift has little impact on the strengthening of the winter monsoon. In the next stage, we will conduct the same simulations at a higher horizontal resolution of 4.4 km, which captures local terrain more accurate. These simulations will use explicit rather than parameterized convection, thereby providing more realistic estimates of heavy precipitation and erosion. Subsequently, we will run the same experiments for the envelop topography. We expect to relate the changes in the frequency and intensity of extreme precipitation to the changes in the local moisture transport and vertical movement in the high-resolution perspective. In the future, the two different topographies along with the modern topography will be used for simulations of two time periods in the past (i.e., the Last Glacial Maximum (21,000 years ago) and a phase in the Late Miocene (∼7 Ma)) and the future climate (2070–2100).