Changes in monsoon precipitation in East Asia under a 2°C interglacial warming

Abstract

Past intervals of warming provide the unique opportunity to observe how the East Asia monsoon precipitation response happened in a warming world. However, the available evaluations are primarily limited to the last glacial-to-interglacial warming, which has fundamental differences from the current interglacial warming, particularly in changes in ice volume. Comparative paleoclimate studies of earlier warm interglacial periods can provide more realistic analogs. Here, we present high-resolution quantitative reconstructions of temperature and precipitation from north-central China over the past 800 thousand years. We found that the average precipitation increase, estimated by the interglacial data, was only around one-half of that estimated for the glacial-to-interglacial data, which is attributed to the amplification of climate change by ice volume variations. Analysis of the interglacial data suggests an increase in monsoon precipitation of ~100 mm for a warming level of 2°C on the Chinese Loess Plateau.