Spatial and Temporal Variations in Precipitation Amount, Frequency, Intensity, and Persistence in China, 1973–2016

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, we examined the spatial and temporal variations in precipitation amount, frequency, and intensity in China based on daily precipitation data from 2050 weather stations from 1973 to 2016. We used two Markov chain parameters to quantify the wet persistence and dry persistence that characterizes the temporal pattern of wet and dry days, respectively. We found that China’s annual precipitation changed little from 1973 to 2016, but varied dramatically from 524 to 688 mm yr−1, with an average of 592 mm yr−1, during this period. China’s precipitation frequency, the number of days with effective precipitation (>0.1 mm day−1) in a year, significantly decreased at a rate of 0.9 days decade−1 from 1973 to 2016, but precipitation intensity significantly increased at a rate of 0.12 mm day−1 decade−1 during the same period. Of the changes in China’s total precipitation amount, precipitation intensity played a dominant role, contributing 70.8%, while precipitation frequency contributed the remaining 29.2%. Little change was found in the wet persistence in China over the period of 1973–2016, but the dry persistence significantly increased with an average increasing trend of 1.62 × 10−3 probability per decade during the same period, and no significant correlations were found between these two variables. China’s precipitation also changed nonuniformly in space, with increasing trends in precipitation amount, frequency, intensity, and wet persistence in western and northeastern China but decreasing trends in the Sichuan basin, northeast of Inner Mongolia, and the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region.