800 Years of Paleoclimate Patterns Unearthed in Largest Study of Asia’s Rivers

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Asian Monsoon Region Map

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Figure 1. Map of the Asian Monsoon area; river basins associated with this research study are highlighted by subregion, rivers coming from the world’s 30 greatest are revealed with names showed in blue. Credit: SUTD

The Singapore University of Technology and Design research study will be important for examining future weather modifications and making more educated water management choices.

813 years of yearly river discharge at 62 stations, 41 rivers in 16 nations, from 1200 to 2012. That is the information that scientists at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) produced after 2 years of research study in order to much better comprehend previous environment patterns of the Asian Monsoon area.

Home to numerous populated river basins, consisting of 10 of the world’s greatest rivers (Figure 1), the Asian Monsoon area supplies water, energy, and food for more than 3 billion individuals. This makes it important for us to comprehend previous environment patterns so that we can much better anticipate long term modifications in the water cycle and the effect they will have on the water system.

To rebuild histories of river discharge, the scientists depend on tree rings. An earlier research study by Cook et al. (2010) established a substantial network of tree ring information websites in Asia and produced a paleodrought record called the Monsoon Asia Drought Atlas (MADA). SUTD scientists utilized the MADA as an input for their river discharge design. They established an ingenious treatment to choose the most pertinent subset of the MADA for each river based upon hydroclimatic resemblance. This treatment enabled the design to draw out the most essential environment signals that affect river discharge from the underlying tree ring information.

Asia River History Heat Map

Figure 2. This “heat map” reveals the rebuilt history of 62 river reaches (each row) over 812 years (each column). The stations are organized around north to south (leading down on y‐axis) and divided into 5 areas as defined in Figure 1: CA (Central Asia), EA (East Asia), WA (West Asia), CN (eastern China), SEA (Southeast Asia), and SA (South Asia). Credit: SUTD

“Our results reveal that rivers in Asia behave in a coherent pattern. Large droughts and major pluvial periods have often occurred simultaneously in adjacent or nearby basins. Sometimes, droughts stretched as far as from the Godavari in India to the Mekong in Southeast Asia (Figure 2). This has important implications for water management, especially when a country’s economy depends on multiple river basins, like in the case of Thailand,” described very first author Nguyen Tan Thai Hung, a PhD trainee from SUTD.

Using contemporary measurements, it has actually been understood that the habits of Asian rivers is affected by the oceans. For circumstances, if the Pacific Ocean ends up being warmer in its tropical area in an El Niño occasion, this will modify climatic blood circulations and most likely cause dry spells in South and Southeast Asian rivers. However, the SUTD research study exposed that this ocean-river connection is not continuous gradually. The scientists discovered that rivers in Asia were much less affected by the oceans in the very first half of the 20th century compared to the 50 years prior to and 50 years after that duration.“This research is of great importance to policymakers; we need to know where and why river discharge changed during the past millennium to make big decisions on water-dependent infrastructure. One such example is the development of the ASEAN Power Grid, conceived to interconnect a system of hydropower, thermoelectric, and renewable energy plants across all ASEAN countries. Our records show that ‘mega-droughts’ have hit multiple power production sites simultaneously, so we can now use this information to design a grid that is less vulnerable during extreme events,” stated primary private investigator Associate Professor Stefano Galelli from SUTD.Reference: “Coherent Streamflow Variability in Monsoon Asia Over the Past Eight Centuries—Links to Oceanic Drivers” by Hung T. T. Nguyen, Sean W. D. Turner, Brendan M. Buckley and Stefano Galelli, 26 September 2020, Water Resources Research.
DOI: 10.1029/2020WR027883

Acknowledgment: Hung Nguyen is supported by the President’s Graduate Fellowship from the Singapore University of Technology and Design. We thank Edward Cook, Caroline Ummenhofer, Nerilie Abram, Nathalie Goodkin, Xun Sun, Murray Peel, Rory Nathan, and Robert Wasson for their informative remarks. We are indebted to Michelle Ho, Justin Maxwell, Valerie Trouet, 2 confidential customers, and the Associate Editor for their positive evaluations. We are grateful to Thanh Dang, Mukund Rao, Christoph Libisch‐Lehner, Rosanne D’Arrigo, Donghoon Lee, and Caroline Leland for streamflow information of the Mekong, Brahmaputra, Angat, Citarum, Han, and Yeruu Rivers.



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