Abstract
The scientific community has widely reported the impacts of climate change on the Central Himalaya. To qualify and quantify these effects, long-term land surface temperature observations in both the daytime and nighttime, acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer from 2000 to 2017, were used in this study to investigate the spatiotemporal variations and their changing mechanism. Two periodic parameters, the mean annual surface temperature (MAST) and the annual maximum temperature (MAXT), were derived based on an annual temperature cycle model to reduce the influences from the cloud cover and were used to analyze their trend during the period. The general thermal environment represented by the average MAST indicated a significant spatial distribution pattern along with the elevation gradient. Behind the clear differences in the daytime and nighttime temperatures at different physiographical regions, the trend test conducted with the Mann-Kendall (MK) method showed that most of the areas with significant changes showed an increasing trend, and the nighttime temperatures exhibited a more significant increasing trend than the daytime temperatures, for both the MAST and MAXT, according to the changing areas. The nighttime changing areas were more widely distributed (more than 28%) than the daytime changing areas (around 10%). The average change rates of the MAST and MAXT in the daytime are 0.102 °C/yr and 0.190 °C/yr, and they are generally faster than those in the nighttime (0.048 °C/yr and 0.091 °C/yr, respectively). The driving force analysis suggested that urban expansion, shifts in the courses of lowland rivers, and the retreat of both the snow and glacier cover presented strong effects on the local thermal environment, in addition to the climatic warming effect. Moreover, the strong topographic gradient greatly influenced the change rate and evidenced a significant elevation-dependent warming effect, especially for the nighttime LST. Generally, this study suggested that the nighttime temperature was more sensitive to climate change than the daytime temperature, and this general warming trend clearly observed in the central Himalayan region could have important influences on local geophysical, hydrological, and ecological processes.
Highlights
Mountainous regions are usually characterized as fragile eco-environments
Because mountainous environments are highly sensitive to climate change, their responses to global climatic change are observed earlier than those of the surrounding lowlands, and they are are ideal indicators for related studies
The Himalayan Mountains, which constitute one of the most fragile ecosystems in the world, play an important role in providing necessary ecosystem services, including the supply of water, biodiversity, and natural resources; these services are significantly affected by the effects of human activity and global warming
Summary
Mountainous regions are usually characterized as fragile eco-environments. Global climate change issues related to mountainous areas have become a growing concern worldwide, thereby motivating many scientific and political global-scale initiatives, including cooperative regional organizations, international conferences, and projects [1]. The Himalayan Mountains, which constitute one of the most fragile ecosystems in the world, play an important role in providing necessary ecosystem services, including the supply of water, biodiversity, and natural resources; these services are significantly affected by the effects of human activity and global warming. In tandem with the retreat of glaciers, global warming favors an upslope shift of alpine tree lines around the world, especially in the Himalayas [3]
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