What Drives the Seasonal March of the Monsoons?

Simona Bordoni · portrait · 3:31

Resources

Video ID

simona-bordoni

Video

https://demo.lt.org/videos/portrait/simona-bordoni/video.mp4

Poster

https://demo.lt.org/videos/portrait/simona-bordoni/poster.jpg

Subtitles · English

https://demo.lt.org/videos/portrait/simona-bordoni/en.vtt

Document

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  "content": {
    "title": "What Drives the Seasonal March of the Monsoons?",
    "author": "Simona Bordoni",
    "description": "Monsoons feed half of humanity, yet textbooks still explain them as giant sea breezes. Simona Bordoni dismantles that picture in this publication. She shows the monsoon as a planetary-scale shift of the tropical overturning circulation, explains why rain bands jump rather than drift with the sun, and what this modern theory changes for how monsoons respond to a warming world.",
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    "chapters": [
      {
        "name": "About",
        "start": 7.5
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      {
        "name": "Research",
        "start": 62.941
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      {
        "name": "Findings",
        "start": 121.008
      }
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    "metadata": {
      "transcript": {
        "generatedByAi": true,
        "entries": [
          {
            "start": 7.46,
            "text": "Hi, I am Simona Bordoni. I was trained in Italy as a physicist but then discovered atmospheric sciences a little bit by chance and so I crossed the ocean and a continent and went to the United States where I got a PhD in atmospheric and oceanic sciences at UCLA."
          },
          {
            "start": 25.04,
            "text": "I then did a brief postdoc at Caltech and then a little bit of a longer postdoc at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado to then go back."
          },
          {
            "start": 36.44,
            "text": "As a faculty member I started as an assistant professor in environmental science and engineering at Caltech again in Pasadena, California."
          },
          {
            "start": 46.22,
            "text": "After spending about 10 years there on the faculty I got the opportunity to go back to Italy where I am now at the University of Trento."
          },
          {
            "start": 55.42,
            "text": "I've been there for a little bit longer than four years as a professor of atmospheric physics."
          },
          {
            "start": 61.64,
            "text": "I am one of the PIs involved in the theme storms and ocean."
          },
          {
            "start": 68.4,
            "text": "It's a bit of a weird collocation as I primarily think about the atmosphere but what we're really trying to do as part of nextGEMS is trying to understand how resolving all of the small scale processes both in the atmosphere and the ocean impacts the representation of large-scale features such as the tropical overturning circulation known as the Hadley cell, monsoonal circulations and associated precipitation patterns."
          },
          {
            "start": 101.2,
            "text": "So we spend a lot of time looking at these large-scale features, and one of the big goals is trying to understand where some of the most persistent biases relative to observations, for instance in tropical precipitation, originate."
          },
          {
            "start": 119.1,
            "text": "Being involved in nextGEMS has been very exciting, very inspiring but also somewhat challenging."
          },
          {
            "start": 130.88,
            "text": "For me it has really been a big change and step in terms of the tools that I'm using."
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          {
            "start": 137.22,
            "text": "In the past I've used a lot very idealized climate models and what I mean by that is that those models are idealized in terms of the configuration."
          },
          {
            "start": 147.6,
            "text": "For instance, I work a lot on aquaplanets that lack any land on the surface and also very idealized in terms of the physics that is being represented."
          },
          {
            "start": 157.94,
            "text": "That is, for instance, most times I don't even have a representation of clouds and really the goal of this approach is to focus on the fundamental processes in the absence of important but still poorly understood and poorly constrained phenomena such as, for instance, clouds."
          },
          {
            "start": 173.24,
            "text": "And when it comes to our biggest finding in nextGEMS, we still don't have a major breakthrough."
          },
          {
            "start": 179.22,
            "text": "We spend a lot of time trying to understand where some important biases in the representation of tropical precipitation arise in climate models."
          },
          {
            "start": 188.28,
            "text": "One in particular that has been very stubborn and has persisted for generations of climate models, and is the tendency of these models to overdo precipitation falling over the tropical Pacific south of the equator."
          },
          {
            "start": 204.72,
            "text": "And so stay tuned for what's next to come."
          }
        ]
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      "inANutshell": {
        "generatedByAi": true,
        "keyTakeaway": "Monsoons are shifts of the global tropical circulation, not big sea breezes, and that changes their future.",
        "summary": "The old land-sea-contrast story cannot explain monsoon onset's suddenness. Seen as a reorganisation of the Hadley circulation driven by atmospheric energetics, the abrupt jumps, the timing, and the differences between monsoon systems fall into place. The energetic view also gives sharper predictions of how monsoon rains shift as the planet warms."
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            "label": "Hadley circulation",
            "description": "The planetary overturning of the tropical atmosphere whose ascending branch carries the rains.",
            "start": 0
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          {
            "label": "Monsoon onset",
            "description": "The abrupt seasonal jump of tropical rain bands onto the continents.",
            "start": 62.941
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          {
            "label": "Energy flux equator",
            "description": "The latitude where atmospheric energy transport vanishes, a powerful predictor of where tropical rain sits.",
            "start": 121.008
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            "title": "Large-scale atmospheric dynamics",
            "description": "The physics of planetary circulations that organise weather and climate."
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          {
            "title": "Monsoon dynamics",
            "description": "The seasonal circulations that deliver most rainfall to the world's most populous regions."
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      "underlyingPublication": {
        "items": [
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            "title": "An energetic framework for monsoon onset and migration",
            "authors": ["Simona Bordoni"],
            "journal": "Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences",
            "abstract": "Theory and simulations recast monsoon onset as a regime transition of the tropical overturning circulation.",
            "url": "https://doi.org/10.5555/lt-demo.simona-bordoni"
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