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Recent trends in precipitation over the Myanmar Coast during onset and withdrawal phases of monsoon season

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Abstract

Monsoon precipitation is the major driver of agricultural productivity in the Myanmar Coast; it is crucial to quantify and understand recent changes in precipitation during the monsoon season over this region. By using multiple precipitation datasets, we demonstrate that total precipitation during monsoon season over the Myanmar Coast has increased slightly but not significantly, but precipitation during the onset and withdrawal phases of monsoon season exhibit a significant increasing trend during 1979–2015, and the contribution of precipitation during the two phases to total monsoon precipitation has increased significantly. The increased precipitation during the onset phase over the Myanmar Coast directly results from the earlier onset of the South Asian Summer Monsoon in recent decades, which is associated with the phase transition of the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation in the late 1990s. And the precipitation increase during the withdrawal phase is directly due to the enhances of the ascending motion and convection around this region, which is dynamically correlated to the anomalous cyclone-like circulation around the Bay of Bengal as well as the strengthening of the cross-equatorial flow around the equatorial Indian Ocean.

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Data availability

All the data used in this research are available in the public domain at the links provided in the texts.

Code availability

The code used in this research will be available (by the corresponding author), upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The GPCP precipitation and ERSSTv5 data are provided by NOAA/OAR/ESRL PSL from their website at https://psl.noaa.gov/. The GPCC precipitation data is obtained from http://gpcc.dwd.de/. The APHRODITE precipitation data is obtained from http://aphrodite.st.hirosaki-u.ac.jp/download/. The ERA-Interim data is provided by ECMWF from their website at http://apps.ecmwf.int/datasets/. The Outgoing Longwave Radiation data are provided by NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information from their website at https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant numbers 41704004, 42074035) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2042020kf0009) and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2018M630880; 2019T120687).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Geodesy and Geomatics, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430079, China

    Xiao Yan, Yibin Yao, Liang Zhang & Bao Zhang

  2. School of Atmospheric Physics, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, Nanjing, China

    Yuanjian Yang

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  1. Xiao Yan
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Contributions

Xiao Yan and Yibin Yao performed background research and designed the study with input from Yuanjian Yang and Bao Zhang. Liang Zhang led the precipitation data collecting and preprocessing. Xiao Yan designed the figures with additional data prepared by Yuanjian Yang. Xiao Yan and Yibin Yao wrote the manuscript. All authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Yibin Yao or Liang Zhang.

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Yan, X., Yao, Y., Yang, Y. et al. Recent trends in precipitation over the Myanmar Coast during onset and withdrawal phases of monsoon season. Theor Appl Climatol 145, 363–376 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-021-03613-0

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