Changing climate in our lifetime: A review

Abstract

During the last decades, considerable efforts have been spent for climate studies, in particular to better understand changing climate. In turn, several significant trends in climatic variables have been reported. Explaining such trends is challenging – some of them have been considered contradictory to another. Various hypotheses have also been suggested for general description of changing climate. At this point in time, it would be beneficial to look back and carefully recollect our knowledge about climate change. In this paper, we aim to provide a comprehensive review on our forefront knowledge in this context with focus on the trends in temperature, solar radiation, wind speed, evaporation, and precipitation. Major trends, namely warming, dimming, and stilling, are demonstrated together with evaporation paradox and increasing precipitation variability, using data at Seoul. On the basis of understanding these notions, we suggest four key implications to hydrologists and engineers.