The heating of the plateau correlated with monsoon rainfall but only during the early and late parts of the season, they observed in a paper published recently in Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.
As the vast Tibetan plateau, high up in the mountains, warmed during the summer months, it heated the air above, which then rose and created an area of low pressure, explained Dr. Rajagopalan. That belt of low pressure sucked in moisture from the oceans, thus initiating the monsoon.
The heating of the Tibetan plateau correlated well with rainfall over India from May 20 to June 15 when the monsoon was setting in. But then the correlation disappeared only to reappear again for rainfall between September 1 and October 15 when the monsoon was tailing off. “We don’t have a very good answer yet” about how the Tibetan plateau could be influencing the late stage of the monsoon, he said.