Abstract
Tropical Indian Ocean warming has intensified under greenhouse forcing, yet its influence on North American terrestrial and agricultural productivity remains poorly understood. Here we show that summer tropical Indian Ocean warming is linked to widespread drying and reduced gross primary productivity across North America. Observations and model simulations reveal that tropical Indian Ocean-induced atmospheric heating excites stationary Rossby wave trains, which establish a high-pressure ridge over western North America and suppresses moisture transport into the continent. This leads to reduced precipitation and soil moisture, leading to 10-20% reductions in terrestrial productivity and crop yields. The relationship persists after excluding El Niño–Southern Oscillation years and is reproduced in multiple climate models, showing robust teleconnection processes. These results highlight a previously underappreciated pathway through which tropical Indian Ocean warming can weaken the North American land carbon sink under future climate change.
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Data availability
All observed data used in this study are publicly available (https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/ data.20thC_ReanV3.html; https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.noaa.ersst.v5.html). The data can be downloaded from https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.30813968.
Code availability
The codes used in this study can be downloaded here: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.30813968.
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Acknowledgements
Y.-M.Y. is supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea(NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (No. RS-2025-23524302 and RS-2024-00416848).
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Y.-M.Y., S.-I.A., and B.W. conceived the idea. Y.-M.Y. performed the model experiments and analyses. S.-I.A., Y.-M.Y., S.-W.Y., B.W., J.-H.P., and J.K. wrote the manuscript. All authors provided critical feedback and helped shape the research, analysis, and manuscript.
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Communications Earth and Environment thanks the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary handling editors: Jinfeng Chang, Somaparna Ghosh, and Aliénor Lavergne [A peer review file is available].
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Yang, YM., Park, JH., Kim, J. et al. Tropical Indian Ocean forcing on North American terrestrial and agricultural productivity decline under greenhouse warming.
Commun Earth Environ (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-03126-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-03126-y
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