title: Intensified Springtime Deep Convection over the South China Sea and the Philippine Sea Dries Southern China.
abstract: Springtime rainfall, accounting for 25-40% of the annual rainfall in southern China, exerts great agricultural and socioeconomic impacts on the region. In the recent decades, southern China has experienced a significant declining trend of precipitation in boreal spring. Meanwhile, precipitation has increased over the South China Sea and the Philippine Sea (SCS-PhS). This paper presents observational and modeling evidences suggesting that the intensified latent heating released by the convection over SCS-PhS leads to suppressed springtime rainfall over southern China. Moisture budget analysis indicates that the drying trend over southern China is due mainly to weakened convergence of moisture flux, which is controlled by a heat-induced anomalous overturning circulation reinforced by the convection over SCS-PhS. Further idealized simulations support the feature that the heat-induced overturning circulation and its corresponding anomalous cyclone can be well established in several days under the spring mean flow condition. Thus, this rapid dynamic process is associated with both the intraseasonal-to-interannual variations and the long-term change of the springtime rainfall over southern China.
authors.affiliation: School of Atmospheric Sciences, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China.
authors.forename: Zhenning
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: School of Atmospheric Sciences, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China.|Guangdong Province Key Laboratory for Climate Change and Natural Disaster Studies, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China.|Institute of Earth Climate and Environment System, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China.
authors.forename: Song
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Numerical Modeling for Atmospheric Sciences and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Bian
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: He
authors.affiliation: Guangdong Province Key Laboratory for Climate Change and Natural Disaster Studies, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China.|School of Atmospheric Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China.
authors.forename: Chundi
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Hu