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Arid Land Geography ›› 2021, Vol. 44 ›› Issue (1): 36-46.doi: 10.12118/j.issn.1000–6060.2021.01.04

• Climatology and Hydrology • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Spatiotemporal climate variation and its influencing factors in Shaanxi Province based on extreme-point symmetric mode decomposition

SHEN Yuchen(),LI Shuangshuang(),YAN Junping,WU Yaqun,WANG Chengbo   

  1. School of Geography and Tourism,Shaanxi Normal University,Xi’an 710119,Shaanxi, China
  • Received:2019-08-15 Revised:2019-12-24 Online:2021-01-25 Published:2021-03-09
  • Contact: Shuangshuang LI E-mail:shenyuchenhappy@163.com;lss40609010@126.com

Abstract:

Against the background of global warming affected by human activities and climate system fluctuations, climate response is non-linear and nonsmoothed. A hot topic is how to identify multiple-time scale information about climatic change. The spatiotemporal characteristics of climate change were analyzed for three geographical sub-regions of Shaanxi Province by sliding average, trend analysis, and extreme-point symmetric mode decomposition (ESMD) methods, using daily temperature and precipitation data between 1970 and 2017 and then discussing the tele-correlation between sea surface temperature (SST) in 17 different sea areas and the regional temperature and precipitation changes. The main SST indexes included El Niño-Southern Oscillation, Pacific Decadal Oscillation, Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation, Quasi-Biennial Oscillation (QBO), and Kuroshio Current SST (KCSST). The results showed that from 1970 to 2017, the mean annual temperature in Shaanxi rose significantly, with step-change points in 1984, 1999, and 2012. In detail, climate change in northern Shaanxi involved warming-drying, cooling-wetting, and warming-wetting, whereas in Guanzhong Plain and southern Shaanxi, there was warming-drying from 1970 to 1999. Since 1999, the regional climate of these two regions exhibited a warming hiatus, and it was not until 2012 that intensified warming and decreasing precipitation have become more obvious. The ESMD of temperature and precipitation signals showed a non-linear upward trend, which implied changes on decadal scales (9.2-11.5 a) in response to the warming hiatus. The temperature increased in Guanzhong Plain and southern Shaanxi, except for a slight decline in northern Shaanxi in 1999—2017. Spatial differences exist in the influencing factors of temperature and precipitation in Shaanxi Province. The SST of eastern China is the dominant influencing factor for annual and decadal temperature variability. Temperatures generally increase in Shaanxi with positive SST anomaly for both NINO A and KCSST. Additionally, positive SST anomalies in the central equatorial Pacific cause decreasing precipitation in both Guanzhong Plain and southern Shaanxi. Less precipitation was expected in northern Shaanxi with increasing positive SST anomalies centered in the eastern equatorial Pacific, commonly known as the East Pacific type of El Niño. The above results could provide insights for the regional response and risk management of extreme precipitation resulting from global climate change. However, it should be noted that the connections between the SST and climate anomalies in Shaanxi Province are not clear. Hence, future work should determine the SST-forced heat and moisture stress anomalies to explain rainfall variations.

Key words: extreme-point symmetric mode decomposition (ESMD), climate change, spatiotemporal analysis, Shaanxi Province