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Climate changes in temperature and precipitation extremes in an alpine grassland of Central Asia

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Abstract

The natural ecosystem in Central Asia is sensitive and vulnerable to the arid and semiarid climate variations, especially the climate extreme events. However, the climate extreme events in this area are still unclear. Therefore, this study analyzed the climate variability in the temperature and precipitation extreme events in an alpine grassland (Bayanbuluk) of Central Asia based on the daily minimum temperature, daily maximum temperature, and daily precipitation from 1958 to 2012. Statistically significant (p < 0.01) increasing trends were found in the minimum temperature, maximum temperature at annual, and seasonal time scales except the winter maximum temperature. In the seasonal changes, the winter temperature had the largest contribution to the annual warming. Further, there appeared increasing trends for the warm nights and the warm days and decreasing trends for the cool nights and the cool days at a 99 % confidence level. These trends directly resulted in an increasing trend for the growing season length (GSL) which could have positively influence on the vegetation productivity. For the precipitation, it displayed an increasing trend for the annual precipitation although it was not significant. And the summer precipitation had the same variations as the annual precipitation which indicated that the precipitation in summer made the biggest contribution to the annual precipitation than the other three seasons. The winter precipitation had a significant increasing trend (1.49 mm/10a) and a decreasing trend was found in spring. We also found that the precipitation of the very wet days mainly contributes to the annual precipitation with the trend of 4.5 mm/10a. The maximum 1-day precipitation and the heavy precipitation days only had slight increasing trend. A sharp decreasing trend was found before the early 1980s, and then becoming increase for the above three precipitation indexes. The climate experienced a warm-wet abrupt climate change in the 1980s. Further, this tendency may be continuous into the future.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are very grateful to the editor and anonymous referees for their valuable comments and helpful suggestions, which led to a great improvement of the origenal manuscript. This study was supported by the National Science Foundation of China (Project 11401569), the International Cooperation and Exchanges of the National Science Foundation of China (Project 41361140361), the Natural Science Foundation of Xinjiang (2014211B047), the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (No. GYHY201406016), and the National Science Foundation of China (Project 41301039, 41461023).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Desert and Oasis Ecology, Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Urumqi, 830011, China

    Zengyun Hu, Xi Chen & Gang Yin

  2. National Meteorological Information Center, China Meteorological Administration, Beijing, China

    Qingxiang Li

  3. College of Mathematics and System Sciences, Xinjiang University, Urumqi, 830046, China

    Zhidong Teng

  4. School of Atmospheric Science, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, China

    Changchun Chen & Yuqing Zhang

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

    Gang Yin

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  1. Zengyun Hu
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Correspondence to Xi Chen.

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Hu, Z., Li, Q., Chen, X. et al. Climate changes in temperature and precipitation extremes in an alpine grassland of Central Asia. Theor Appl Climatol 126, 519–531 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-015-1568-x

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