Relative impacts of insolation changes, meltwater fluxes and ice sheets on African and Asian monsoons during the Holocene

In order to better understand the evolution of the Afro-Asian monsoon in the early Holocene, we investigate the impact on boreal summer monsoon characteristics of (1) a freshwater flux in the North Atlantic from the surrounding melting ice sheets and (2) a remnant ice sheet over North America and Europe. Sensitivity experiments run with the IPSL_CM4 model show that both the meltwater flux and the remnant ice sheets induce a cooling of similar amplitude of the North Atlantic leading to a southward shift of the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone over the tropical Atlantic and to a reduction of the African monsoon. The two perturbations have different impacts in the Asian sector. The meltwater flux results in a weakening of the Indian monsoon and no change in the East Asian monsoon, whereas the remnant ice sheets induce a strengthening of the Indian monsoon and a strong weakening of the East Asian monsoon. Despite the similar coolings in the Atlantic Ocean, the ocean heat transport is reduced only in the meltwater flux experiment, which induces slight differences between the two experiments in the role of the surface latent heat flux in the tropical energetics. In the meltwater experiment, the southward shift of the subtropical jet acts to cool the upper atmosphere over the Tibetan Plateau and hence to weaken the Indian monsoon. In the ice sheet experiment this effect is overwhelmed by the changes in extratropical stationary waves induced by the ice sheets, which are associated with a larger cooling over the Eurasian continent than in the meltwater experiment. However these sensitivity experiments suggest that insolation is the dominant factor explaining the relative changes of the African, Indian and East Asian monsoons from the early to the mid-Holocene.