Spatial patterns of climate change and associated climate hazards in Northwest China

Abstract

Northwest China (NWC) is experiencing noticeable climate change accompanied with increasing impacts of climate hazards induced by changes in climate extremes. Towards developing climate adaptation strategies to mitigate the negative climatic impacts on both the ecosystem and socioeconomic system of the region, this study investigates systematically the spatial patterns of climate change and the associated climate hazards across NWC based on high resolution reanalysis climate dataset for the period 1979 to 2018. We find that NWC overall is under a warming and wetting transition in climate with change rate of temperature and precipitation around 0.49 °C/10a and 22.8 mm/10a respectively. Characteristics of climate change over the NWC however vary considerably in space. According to significance of long-term trends in both temperature and aridity index for each 0.1° × 0.1° grids, five types of climate change are identified across NWC, including warm-wetting, warm-drying, warm without wetting, wetting without warming and unchanging. The warm-wetting zone accounts for the largest proportion of the region (41%) and mainly locates in the arid or semi-arid northwestern NWC. Our findings show most region of NWC is under impacts of intensifying heatwave and rainstorm due to significant increases in high temperature extremes and precipitation extremes. The warming but without wetting zone is found under a more severe impact of heatwave, particularly for areas near northern Mount. Qinling and northern Loess Plateau. Areas with stronger wetting trend is suffering more from rainstorm.