Large scale climate oscillation impacts on temperature, precipitation and land surface phenology in Central Asia

Kirsten M De Beurs,Irina N Sokolik,Geoffrey M Henebry,Braden C Owsley

doi:10.1088/1748-9326/aac4d0

Kirsten M De Beurs, Irina N Sokolik + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aac4d0

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Abstract

Central Asia has been rapidly changing in multiple ways over the past few decades. Increases in temperature and likely decreases in precipitation in Central Asia as the result of global climate change are making one of the most arid regions in the world even more susceptible to large-scale droughts. Global climate oscillations, such as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, have previously been linked to observed weather patterns in Central Asia. However, until now it has been unclear how the different climate oscillations act simultaneously to affect the weather and subsequently the vegetated land surface in Central Asia. We fit well-established land surface phenology models to two versions of MODIS data to identify the land surface phenology of Central Asia between 2001 and 2016. We then combine five climate oscillation indices into one regression model and identify the relative importance of each of these indices on precipitation, temperature, and land surface phenology, to learn where each climate index has the strongest influence. Our analyses illustrate that the North Atlantic Oscillation, the East Atlantic/West Russia pattern, and the Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation predominantly influence temperature in the northern part of Central Asia. We also show that the Scandinavia index and the Multivariate ENSO index both reveal significant impacts on the precipitation in this region. Thus, we conclude that the land surface phenology across Central Asia is affected by several climate modes, both those that are strongly linked to far northern weather patterns and those that are forced by southern weather patterns, making this region a ‘climate change hotspot’ with strong spatial variations in weather patterns. We also show that regional climate patterns play a significant role in Central Asia, indicating that global climate patterns alone might not be sufficient to project weather patterns and subsequent land surface changes in this region.

Highlights

Central Asia is one of the most arid regions in the world with a large fraction of the population relying directly on agriculture and pastoralism, making these people especially vulnerable to drought (Reyer et al 2017)
We evaluate the results of the land surface phenology model for Central Asia by analyzing the R2adj, which summarizes the fit for the quadratic model
While human influences play a significant role in large swaths of Central Asia, in this paper we have focused our attention on the effect of multiple climate oscillations on the weather and land surface phenology of the region

Summary

Introduction

Central Asia is one of the most arid regions in the world with a large fraction of the population relying directly on agriculture and pastoralism, making these people especially vulnerable to drought (Reyer et al 2017). Increases in temperature and decreases in precipitation are already evident, especially in the western part of Central Asia (Lioubimtseva et al2015, Hu et al 2016), making the region increasingly prone to droughts (Barlow et al 2016). The hot summer of 2010 provides an example of a ‘megaheatwave,’ occurrences which are predicted to increase by a factor of 5–10 (Barriopedro et al 2011) This particular heat event at least partly resulted from a strong deficit of January to July precipitation, and the resulting lack of water availability exacerbated the strength of the heat wave (Barriopedro et al 2011). While the major heat dome was located north of Central Asia, Kazakhstan was affected by increased temperatures, breaking summer heat records

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