Tandong Yao,1,2 Valerie Masson-Delmotte,3 Jing Gao,1 Wusheng Yu,1 Xiaoxin
Yang,1 Camille Risi,4 Christophe Sturm,5 Martin Werner,6
Huabiao Zhao,1 You He,1 Wei Ren,1Lide Tian,1,2 Chunming
Shi,3 and Shugui Hou2,7
1Key Laboratory of Tibetan Environment Changes and Land SurfaceProcesses, Institute of
Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
2State Key Laboratory of Cryospheric Sciences, Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and
Engineering Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lanzhou, China.
3LSCE, UMR 8212, IPSL, CEA/CNRS/UVSQ, Gif-sur-Yvette, France.
4LMD, IPSL, CNRS/UPMC, Paris, France.
5Bert Bolin Centre for Climate Research and Department of Geological Sciences, Stockholm
University, Stockholm, Sweden.
6Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, Germany.
7Key Laboratory for Coast and Island Development of Ministry of Education, School of
Geographic and Oceanographic Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China.
The stable oxygen isotope ratio (δ18O) in precipitation is an integrated tracer of atmospheric
processes worldwide.Since the 1990s, an intensive effort has been dedicated to
studying precipitation isotopic composition at more than 20 stations in the Tibetan Plateau (TP) located at
the convergence of air masses between the westerlies and Indian monsoon. In this paper, we establish a
database of precipitation δ18O and use different models to evaluate the climatic controls of
precipitation δ18O over the TP. The spatial and temporal patterns of precipitation
δ18O and their relationships with temperature and precipitation reveal three distinct domains,
respectively associated with the influence of the westerlies (northern TP), Indian monsoon (southern TP),
and transition in between. Precipitation δ18O in the monsoon domain experiences an abrupt
decrease in May and most depletion in August, attributable to the shifting moisture origin between Bay of
Bengal (BOB) and southern Indian Ocean. High- resolution atmospheric models capture the spatial and temporal
patterns of precipitation δ18O and their relationships with moisture
transport from the westerlies and Indian monsoon. Only in the westerlies domain are atmospheric models able
to represent the relationships between climate and precipitation
δ18O. More significant temperature effect exists when either the westerlies or Indian monsoon is
the sole dominant atmospheric process. The observed and simulated altitude-
δ18O relationships strongly depend on the season and the domain (Indian monsoon or westerlies).
Our results have crucial implications for the interpretation of paleoclimate
records and for the application of atmospheric simulations to quantifying paleoclimate and paleo-elevation
changes.