Monsoon Asia Paleo-Streamflow

Summary

Ten of the world’s biggest rivers are located entirely within the Asian Monsoon region. They provide water, energy, and food for 1.7 billion people. To manage these critical resources, we need a better understanding of river discharge—how does it change over a long time? Are there common variation patterns among rivers? To answer these questions, we use information derived from tree rings to reconstruct average annual river discharge history at 62 gauges in 16 Asian countries. Our reconstruction reveals the riparian footprint of megadroughts and large volcanic eruptions over the past eight centuries. We show that simultaneous droughts and pluvials have often occurred at adjacent river basins in the past, because Asian rivers share common influences from the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans. We also show how these oceanic teleconnections change over space and time. Our findings can inform big decisions made on water-dependent infrastructure, thus benefiting the riparian people of the Asian Monsoon region.

Products

Publications

The reconstruction results and our findings on drivers of streamflow variability are presented in Nguyen et al. (2020). Earlier, we also published a paper on the Linear Dynamical Systems (LDS) method with a test case in Thailand (Nguyen & Galelli, 2018).

Nguyen, H. T. T.(*), Turner, S. W. D., Buckley, B. M., & Galelli, S. (2020). Coherent Streamflow Variability in Monsoon Asia Over the Past Eight Centuries—Links to Oceanic Drivers. Water Resources Research, 56(12). https://doi.org/10.1029/2020WR027883

Nguyen, H. T. T.(*), & Galelli, S. (2018). A Linear Dynamical Systems Approach to Streamflow Reconstruction Reveals History of Regime Shifts in Northern Thailand. Water Resources Research, 54(3), 2057–2077. https://doi.org/10.1002/2017WR022114

Data and code

R package ldsr.

Data and code for the Monsoon Asia and Thailand reconstructions.