Abstract
Under the background of climate change, the Tibetan Plateau presents high spatial and temporal variability in land surface temperature (LST). To understand the spatiotemporal patterns of LST change, this article conducted a spatiotemporal analysis using the Mann-Kendall trend analysis method with time series of mean annual surface temperature extracted from the moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer/Terra daily LST product from 2000 to 2018. The analysis indicated that both daytime and nighttime MASTs show an obvious warming trend with the average rates of 0.028 K/year and 0.069 K/year, and the nighttime variation has larger spatial coverage. Areas ranging from 4500 to 5000 m exhibited the strongest warming effect. The geodetector method was applied to detect the impacts from seven factors, including elevation, land cover type, latitude, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), precipitation, air temperature, and solar radiation on the spatial distribution of LST. The controlling effects of these factors were generally stronger in the nighttime than those in the daytime, and elevation was the most important factor with the contribution scores of 27.12% and 62.98% in the daytime and nighttime, respectively. In addition, the analysis revealed that the temporal changes of LST were mainly caused by surface properties (vegetation, snow cover, and water surface area) changes, radiant flux changes induced by cloud amount changes, and climate warming. In general, this article provides important insights into the spatiotemporal dynamics of LST in the TP since 2000 and helps to reveal the impact of climate change on ecoenvironmental conservation.
Highlights
The Tibetan Plateau (TP), known as the third pole in the world, plays an important role in global atmospheric action because of its unique topographic features [1]
The mean annual surface temperature (MAST) values extracted with the annual temperature cycle (ATC) model by fitting the daily land surface temperature (LST) values can generate a gap-free temperature map of the study area, as shown in Fig. 4(c) and (d)
Based on the MAST extracted by the ATC model, the MK test was applied to analyze the temperature temporal change pattern over the study period
Summary
The Tibetan Plateau (TP), known as the third pole in the world, plays an important role in global atmospheric action because of its unique topographic features [1]. Many recent efforts have been made to explore the impact of climate change and responses. These studies cover different concerns, including permafrost change [3], snow cover variation [4, 5], variation in alpine vegetation [6], water resource assessment [7,8,9], and desertification [10, 11]. From the above monitoring or change detection, there is a common view that the global warming effect plays a key role. It is essential to effectively understand the dynamics of the thermal environment in the TP [12, 13]
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