Droughts and Excessive Moisture Events in Southern Siberia in the Late XXth - Early XXIst Centuries

Abstract

In recent years much research has been devoted to global and regional climate changes. Special attention was paid to climate extremes, such as droughts and excessive moisture events. In this study the moisture and aridity of Southern Siberia are estimated using web-GIS called “CLIMATE”. The system “CLIMATE” is part of a hardware and software cloud storage complex for data analysis of various climatic data sets, with algorithms for searching, extracting, processing, and visualizing the data. The ECMWF ERA-Interim reanalysis data for Southern Siberia (50-65°N, 60-120°E) from 1979 to 2010 with a grid cell of 0.75×0.75° is used. Some hydrothermal conditions are estimated using the so-called Ped index (Si), which is a normalized indicator of the ratio of air temperature to precipitation. The mountain regions of Eastern Siberia are becoming more and more arid each month during the last 30 years. In Western Siberia, aridity increases in May and decreases in June, in the other months positive and negative trends are found. The greatest differences between the trends of the aridity index (Si), air temperature, and precipitation are observed in July.