Early warnings and missed alarms for abrupt monsoon transitions

Abstract

Abstract. Palaeo-records from China (Cheng et al., 2009; Wang et al., 2008, 2001) demonstrate the East Asian Summer Monsoon (EASM) is dominated by abrupt and large magnitude monsoon shifts on millennial timescales, switching between periods of high and weak monsoon rains. It has been hypothesised that over these timescales, the EASM exhibits two stable states with bifurcation-type tipping points between them (Schewe et al., 2012). Here we test this hypothesis by looking for early warning signals of past bifurcations in speleothem records from Sanbao Cave and Hulu Cave, China (Wang et al., 2008, 2001), spanning the penultimate glacial cycle, and in multiple model simulations derived from the data. We find hysteresis behaviour in our model simulations with transitions directly forced by solar insolation. We detect critical slowing down prior to an abrupt monsoon shift during the penultimate deglaciation consistent with long-term orbital forcing. However, such signals are only detectable when the change in system stability is sufficiently slow to be detected by the sampling resolution of the dataset, raising the possibility that the alarm was missed and a similar forcing drove earlier EASM shifts.