Monsoon and megadroguhts

A recent article in the journal Science discusses the historical droughts over Asia, based on tree-ring data. It is a first attempt to provide a spatial distribution of monsoon rainfalls based on those proxy data. The authors have presented a Monsoon Asia Drought Atlas (MADA), which is a seasonally resolved gridded spatial reconstruction of Asian monsoon drought and pluvials over the past millennium. It is suggested that the atlas provides the spatiotemporal details of known historic monsoon failures and reveals the occurrence, severity, and fingerprint of previously unknown monsoon megadroughts and their close linkages to large-scale patterns of tropical Indo-Pacific sea surface temperatures.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/328/5977/486

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