Interconnections between the Asian monsoon, ENSO, and high northern latitude climate during the Holocene

The International Geosphere Biosphere Program (IGBP), which promotes better understanding of the living environment, was initiated in the early 1990s. IGBP and other programs have uncovered much evi-dence that the Earth system is complex and nonlinear, ex…

Interconnections between the Asian monsoon, ENSO, and high northern latitude climate during the Holocene

The article emphatically reviews the research progress in interconnections between the East Asian and Indian Ocean summer monsoons, between the Asian monsoon and the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) activity, and between the monsoon, ENSO and the changing of the North Atlantic climate during the Holocene. According to the studies of recent years, it is found that the intensity variations of the East Asian and Indian Ocean summer monsoons show an opposite relationship, which may be closely related to the phenomena of ENSO in the equatorial Pacific Ocean and the variation of the deep-water formation of the North Atlantic Ocean on the interannual to orbital time scales. The 4k and 8k events occurring at around 4200 and 8200 a BP, respectively, might be the two in a series of severe paleo-El Niño events during the Holocene, strongly reflecting the interactions and influences of the monsoons, ENSO and the North Atlantic climate. In order to better understand the relationships between these paleoclimatic phenomena, scientists need to strengthen the research work on the Asian monsoon division and the comparison between monsoon proxy records, and the study on the proxy record of sea surface temperature with high time-resolution in the equatorial Pacific Ocean and the simulation research of paleoclimate condition.