Abstract
The cold-wet effect of oasis improves the extreme natural conditions of the desert areas significantly. However, the relationship between precipitation and the width of oasis is challenged by the shortage of observed data. In this study, the evolution of annual precipitation from desert to oasis was explored by the model establishment and simulation in Tarim Basin of northwestern China. The model was developed from the principle of maximum information entropy, and was calibrated by the China Meteorological Forcing Dataset with a high spatial resolution of 0.1° from 1990 to 2010. The model performs well in describing the evolution of annual precipitation from the desert to oasis when the oasis is wide enough, and the R2 is generally more than 0.90 and can be up to 0.99. However, it fails to simulate the seasonal precipitation evolution because of the non-convergence solved by nonlinear fitting and the unfixed upper boundary condition solved by the least square method. Through the simulation with the parameters obtained from the nonlinear fitting, the basic patterns, four stages of precipitation evolution with the oasis width increasing, are revealed at annual scale, and the current stages of these oases are also uncovered. Therefore, the establishment of the model and the simulated results provide a deeper insight from the perspective of informatics to understand the regional precipitation evolution of the desert–oasis system. These results are not only helpful in desertification prevention, but also helpful in fusing multisource data, especially in extreme drought desert areas.
Highlights
Oasis serves to improve the extreme natural conditions of the arid regions by affecting the regional hydrometeorological factors [1,2,3,4,5,6,7], and the oasis–desert interactions are important for the stable co-existence of oasis and desert ecosystems [8] and water resources management [9]
Quantifying the spatial evolution of precipitation with the oasis width increase is crucial to the regional eco-environmental security in the arid areas
Many studies are based on the field observation at a low spatial resolution [1,2,3,4,5,6,12,13,14,15,16,17], some multiscale datasets are available in specific areas such as Heihe Basin located in the northwestern China [18]
Summary
Oasis serves to improve the extreme natural conditions of the arid regions by affecting the regional hydrometeorological factors [1,2,3,4,5,6,7], and the oasis–desert interactions are important for the stable co-existence of oasis and desert ecosystems [8] and water resources management [9]. Quantifying the spatial evolution of precipitation with the oasis width increase is crucial to the regional eco-environmental security in the arid areas. The spatial evolutions of precipitation are affected by the cold-wet effect of oasis. Water 2018, 10, 1258 more water vapor source from the evapotranspiration of oasis [3,4]. The local water vapor can account for up to 20% of the precipitation in arid and semiarid regions [12,13] and 20–50% in humid regions [14,15,16,17]. The extreme arid environment leads to the much larger difficulties of data observation. Exploring the relationship between the precipitation and oasis width quantitatively is still challenged by the resolution of data
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