Faraway Antarctic Warming Brings Wetter Summer to South Korea
- Minhoo Jeong
- Apr 9
- 2 min read
April 9, 2025
Minhoo Jeong
Warming in the faraway Southern Ocean is leading to wetter summers in East Asia, including South Korea, according to a new study.
According to Science Daily, a team of researchers led by Dr. Kang Kang-ra, director of the Max Planck Institute for Climate Science in Germany, and Dr. Hanjun Kim of Cornell University in the United States analyzed how the warming of the Antarctic Ocean is causing changes in the global climate and published their findings in the international journal Nature Geoscience on June 2. The Antarctic Ocean absorbs heat from the greenhouse effect and stores it in its deep waters, but it is expected to warm as its storage capacity gradually decreases. The researchers analyzed how this effect affects other regions through “telecorrelation,” a meteorological relationship in which distant regions influence each other.
Climate models show that the Antarctic Ocean heat is carried to the equator by southeast winds and amplified by the interaction between the atmosphere and the ocean, which evaporates low-level clouds, removing the clouds that reflect radiation and amplifying the equatorial warming, which in turn warms the equatorial oceans, causing large warming in the eastern Pacific.
This is similar to the “El Niño” phenomenon, where the eastern Pacific is warm and the western Pacific is cool, the researchers explained.This warming shifts the Asian jet stream southward during the summer, and as it interacts more with the Tibetan mountains, it delivers more moisture to the East Asian monsoon precipitation belt.This results in more moisture and increased precipitation in the summer for East Asia, including the Korean peninsula, which is affected by the monsoon precipitation belt, the researchers explained.
This warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean also plays a role in changing atmospheric circulation in the western United States, increasing winter precipitation, the researchers added.The team noted that the warming of the Southern Ocean is occurring so slowly that this type of teleconnection could take centuries to emerge.“East Asia and the western United States will have to cope with the consequences of global warming for a long time, even if climate protection efforts are successful,” the researchers said, “and this needs to be taken into account when planning long-term adaptation strategies.”
