Article ID: 2020-002
Pre-summer rainy season (April to mid-June) over South China (SC) is characterized by high intensity and frequent occurrence of heavy rainfall in the East Asian monsoon region. This review describes recent progress in the research related to such a phenomenon. The mechanisms responsible for pre-summer rainfall consist of multi-scale processes. Sea surface temperatures over tropical Pacific and Indian Ocean are shown to have a great influence on the interannual variations of pre-summer rainfall over SC. Synoptic disturbances associated with regional extreme rainfall over SC are mainly related to cyclone- and trough-type anomalies. Formation and intensification of such anomalies can be contributed by surface sensible heating and mechanical forcing from the Tibetan Plateau. On a sub-daily scale, double rain belts often co-exist over SC. The northern rain belt is closely linked to dynamic lifting by a subtropical low pressure and its associated front/shear line, while the westward extension of the western North Pacific high and the intensification of the southwesterly monsoonal flows play important roles in providing high-equivalent potential temperature air to the west- and east-inland regions, respectively. The southern rain belt with a smaller horizontal span is in the warm sector over either inland or coastal SC. The warm-sector rainfall over inland SC results from surface heating, local topographic lifting, and urban heat island effect interacting with the sea breeze. The warm-sector rainfall over coastal SC is closely associated with double low-level jets, land-sea-breeze fronts, and coastal mountains. A close relationship is found between convectively-generated quasi-stationary mesoscale outflow boundaries and continuous convective initiation in extreme rainfall events. Active warm-rain microphysical processes can play an important role in some extreme rainfall events, although the relative contributions by warm-rain, riming and ice-phase microphysical processes remain unclear. Moreover, to improve the rainfall prediction, efforts have been made in convection-permitting modeling studies.
