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Atlantic oceanic droughts do not threaten Asian water tower

Nature volume 638, pages E13–E15 (2025)Cite this article

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 19 February 2025

The Original Article was published on 01 March 2023

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arising from: Q. Zhang et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05643-8 (2023).

Understanding changes in Asia’s water tower is important for assessing the sustainability of water supplies to millions of people living in downstream regions. Zhang et al.1 reported that meteorological droughts from the southeast North Atlantic Ocean through mid-latitude westerlies have depleted and will continue to deplete terrestrial water storage (TWS) on the Tibetan Plateau, threatening the sustainability of water supplies from Asia’s water tower. However, they neglected the role of local runoff in TWS changes and erroneously attributed TWS changes to Atlantic oceanic droughts, relying on a problematic water vapour tracking algorithm and assuming a strong correlation between TWS and Atlantic oceanic climate change. Such erroneous attribution of historical TWS changes therefore led to the flawed projection of TWS depletion occurring on the Tibetan Plateau.

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Fig. 1: The temporal relationship between anomalous TWS over the mid-latitude Eurasia region and anomalous PME over the Atlantic Ocean during different time periods.
Fig. 2: The trends of TWS, P–E and P–E–R during 2003–2016.

Data availability

The precipitation, evapotranspiration (evaporation) and runoff data, spanning 2003 to 2022 with a spatial resolution of 0.5°, were acquired from the ECMWF Reanalysis v5 (ERA5). The ERA5 data can be accessed at https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/dataset/ecmwf-reanalysis-v5. The TWS datasets were derived from the Center for Space Research (CSR) GRACE RL06 mascon product. These datasets can be accessed at https://www2.csr.utexas.edu/grace/RL06_mascons.html. Some missing values in the GRACE data (Supplementary Fig. 3) were interpolated using the na.interpolation function in the imputeTS library in the R programming language.

Code availability

The code used to perform the calculations and produce all of the figures is available on GitHub at https://github.com/zhaoyutong/Tibetan-Plateau-water-vapour and Zenodo at https://zenodo.org/record/8265507 (ref. 15).

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research (STEP) programme (2024QZKK0301) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42401139). We also acknowledge the support of the Kathmandu Center for Research and Education, Chinese Academy of Sciences–Tribhuvan University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Tibetan Plateau Earth System, Environment and Resources (TPESER), Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Yutong Zhao, Chaoyi Xu, Xiaoyu Yu, Yigang Liu & Xinhui Ji

  2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Chaoyi Xu, Xiaoyu Yu, Yigang Liu & Xinhui Ji

Authors
  1. Yutong Zhao
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  2. Chaoyi Xu
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  3. Xiaoyu Yu
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  4. Yigang Liu
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  5. Xinhui Ji
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Contributions

Y.Z. designed the study and performed the analysis. Y.Z. and C.X. wrote the manuscript. All of the authors contributed to the text.

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Correspondence to Yutong Zhao or Yigang Liu.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Supplementary Information

This file contains Supplementary Table 1, Supplementary Figures 1–3 and Supplementary References.

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Zhao, Y., Xu, C., Yu, X. et al. Atlantic oceanic droughts do not threaten Asian water tower. Nature 638, E13–E15 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08357-1

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