Change in mean and extreme temperature at Yingkou station in Northeast China from 1904 to 2017

Xiaoying Xue,Chunyu Zhao,Xiujing Yu,Siqi Zhang,Yuyu Ren,Panfeng Zhang,Guoyu Ren,Xiubao Sun

doi:10.1007/s10584-021-02981-w

Abstract

The understanding of centennial trends of extreme temperature has been impeded due to the lack of early-year observations. In this paper, we collect and digitize the daily temperature data set of Northeast China Yingkou meteorological station since 1904. After quality control and homogenization, we analyze the changes of mean and extreme temperature in the past 114 years. The results show that mean temperature (Tmean), maximum temperature (Tmax), and minimum temperature (Tmin) all have increasing trends during 1904–2017. The increase of Tmin is the most obvious with the rate of 0.34 °C/decade. The most significant warming occurs in spring and winter with the rate of Tmean reaching 0.32 °C/decade and 0.31 °C/decade, respectively. Most of the extreme temperature indices as defined using absolute and relative thresholds of Tmax and Tmin also show significant changes, with cold events witnessing a more significant downward trend. The change is similar to that reported for global land and China for the past six decades. It is also found that the extreme highest temperature (1958) and lowest temperature (1920) records all occurred in the first half of the whole period, and the change of extreme temperature indices before 1950 is different from that of the recent decades, in particular for diurnal temperature range (DTR), which shows an opposite trend in the two time periods.

Highlights

Global land-surface mean air temperature (Tmean) has increased significantly over the last century, especially in the last five decades (Lawrimore et al 2011; Jones et al 2012; IPCC 2013)
Tang and Ren (2005), and the following updates based on their method, showed a 0.08–0.10 °C/decade upward increase of annual Tmean during the last 100 years plus for China, much smaller than that of Yingkou station; Cao et al (2013) calculated the average warming trend in the eastern and central China over the last hundred years (1909–2010) based on a homogenized temperature dataset from 16 stations, which shows an annual mean warming rate of 0.15 °C/decade, almost doubling the value as reported in Tang and Ren (2005), but still smaller than the estimated warming trend for Yingkou
the annual extreme maximum (TXx) and TNn significantly increase at rates of 0.18 °C/ decade and 0.56 °C/decade, respectively

Summary

Introduction

Global land-surface mean air temperature (Tmean) has increased significantly over the last century, especially in the last five decades (Lawrimore et al 2011; Jones et al 2012; IPCC 2013). Extreme temperature events have changed significantly over the past 50 years (Zhai and Pan 2003; Gong and Han 2004; Alexander et al 2006; You et al 2011). It is found that the probability of extreme events will increase significantly in the future (Sun et al 2014; Nangombe et al 2018). Statistics show that annual economic losses caused by extreme weather and climate events are well above US$ 200 billion (in 2010 dollars) (Handmer et al 2012). A better understanding of the long-term change in extreme temperature events will benefit the management of climate-related disasters (Handmer et al 2012)

Objectives

Results

Discussion

Conclusion