CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Jan. 13 (UPI) -- The South Asian monsoon that supplies water to billions of people is driven more by heat from India rather than the Tibetan plateau, U.S. scientists said.
The Tibetan plateau had been widely believed to be the source of heat that drives the monsoon, said researchers at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.
Harvard researchers William Boos and Zhiming Kuang developed an atmospheric circulation model that shows the hot, moist thermal drive of the monsoon lies over India and is insulated from colder, drier air by the Himalayan mountain range separating the Indian subcontinent from the Tibetan Plateau.
The Tibetan plateau does boost rainfall locally along its southern edge, but widespread monsoon circulation is otherwise unaffected by the plateau, the online journal Nature reported Wednesday.
The study has implications for how Asian climate may have responded to mountain uplift in the past, and for how it could respond to surface changes in the future.
