On Indian summer monsoon droughts and teleconnections over the past millennium

Ashish Sinha; Nathan. J. Steiger; Liangcheng Tan; Hanying Li; Gayatri Kathayat; Hai Cheng

doi:10.59717/j.xinn-geo.2024.100108

The Innovation Geoscience > 2025 Vol. 3 > No. 1 > 100108

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On Indian summer monsoon droughts and teleconnections over the past millennium

1.
Department of Earth Science, California State University Dominguez Hills, Carson 90747, USA
2.
State Key Laboratory of Loess and Quaternary Geology, Institute of Earth Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi’an 710061, China
3.
Institute of Global Environmental Change, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710061, China
4.
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, Palisades 10964, USA
5.
Institute of Earth Sciences, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 9190401, Israel

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Corresponding authors: asinha@csudh.edu (A.S.); tanlch@ieecas.cn (L.T.); cheng021@xjtu.edu.cn (H.C.)
Received Date: August 09, 2024

Accepted Date: October 11, 2024

Published Online: October 17, 2024

The Innovation Geoscience 3(1), https://doi.org/10.59717/j.xinn-geo.2024.100108 | Cite this article

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1. We present a data assimilation-based reconstruction of the Indian Monsoon droughts over the past millennium.
  
  Our reconstruction reveals several “black swans” droughts—rare events with significant societal impacts.
  
  The El Nio-drought association was highly variable over the past centuries.
  
  Cool extratropical North Atlantic sea surface temperatures are a plausible driver of monsoon droughts.

ABSTRACT

ABSTRACT

Historical documentary accounts from the Indian subcontinent document several decade-to-multidecade clusters of severe Indian summer monsoon (ISM) droughts over the past millennium. Many of these putative droughts have no counterparts in the instrumental period. An objective assessment of the severity and frequency of these droughts and their teleconnections to other parts of the climate system remains uncertain. Here, we use the Paleo Hydrodynamics Data Assimilation (PHYDA) product to address this gap. PHYDA reproduces historical intervals of increased drought frequency with high fidelity and reveals multiple instances of multi-year “black swan” droughts— rare, severe events with significant societal impacts that are consistent with historical accounts. We find that droughts, as well as extended periods of dryness, occurred under both El Niño and non-El Niño conditions, with El Niño explaining ~ 49% of all drought instances. A large number (~42%) of non-El Niño type droughts were forced by cooler extratropical SST anomalies in the North Atlantic region. While El Niño was an important driver, its association with droughts varied considerably, accounting for between 15-80% of droughts depending on the century. The PHYDA’s millennial-length perspective supports expanding the El Niño-centric paradigm of droughts into a framework that includes extratropical teleconnections.

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Sinha A., Steiger N. J., Tan L., et al. (2025). On Indian summer monsoon droughts and teleconnections over the past millennium. The Innovation Geoscience 3:100108. https://doi.org/10.59717/j.xinn-geo.2024.100108

Sinha A., Steiger N. J., Tan L., et al. (2025). On Indian summer monsoon droughts and teleconnections over the past millennium. The Innovation Geoscience 3:100108. https://doi.org/10.59717/j.xinn-geo.2024.100108

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