Desert Air Incursions, an Overlooked Aspect, for the Dry Spells of the Indian Summer Monsoon

The year 2009 was a major drought year for the Indian summer monsoon with a seasonal deficit of rainfall by 21.6%. Standard oceanic predictors such as ENSO and the Indian Ocean dipole are not consistent for these dry spells. There are a host of other parameters such as the Himalayan ice cover, the Eurasian snow cover, the passage of intraseasonal waves, and even accumulated effects of Asian pollution that have been considered for analysis of the dry spells of the monsoon. This paper presents another factor, the western Asian desert air incursions toward central India, and emphasizes the formation of a blocking high over western Asia as an important feature for these dry spells. The blocking high advects descending very dry air toward central India, portrayed using swaths of three-dimensional trajectories. This is a robust indicator for dry spells of the monsoon during the last several decades. This dry air above the 3-km level over central India strongly inhibits the vertical growth of deep convection. Some of the interesting antecedents of the formation of the blocking high include an eastward and somewhat northward extension of the ITCZ over North Africa, a stronger than normal local Hadley cell over North Africa, a strong subtropical jet stream over the southern Mediterranean, and strong conversions of anticyclonic shear vorticity to anticyclonic curvature vorticity. The dynamical antecedents of the aforementioned scenario in this study are related to many aspects of North African weather features. They are portrayed using both reanalysis datasets and ensemble modeling using a suite of coupled atmosphere-ocean models.