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Non-stationary modeling of wet-season precipitation over the Inner Mongolia section of the Yellow River basin

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Abstract

Climate system anomalies and intensified human disturbances have different impacts on the hydrological cycle at different scales, chiefly leading to prominent spatio-temporal heterogeneities in precipitation distributions. It is of great significance to accurately detect the non-stationary changes of precipitation. Focusing on the Inner Mongolia section of the Yellow River basin which is considered as the key ecological barrier in northern China, the best probabilistic model with time-varying moments was established to fit the wet-season precipitation series from 1988 to 2017 for 38 meteorological stations. Considering four three-parameter distributions, time was used as covariate to describe the linear or nonlinear change of each parameter, and model optimization was performed by Akaike Information Criterion. Combined with conventional methods including the Trend-Free Pre-Whitening Mann–Kendall trend test and Sen’s slope estimator, the non-stationary behaviors of wet-season precipitation variability were quantitatively captured. Results showed that the generalized gamma distribution performed best in fitting the wet-season precipitation series in the study area, characterized with high skewness and heavy tails. The non-stationary characteristics of the wet-season precipitation were obvious in most areas during the past 30 years, especially in the central region. The non-stationarities of wet-season precipitation manifested in a downward trend in the mean value, an increase in dispersion degree and significant changes in distribution shape with time, consequently adding the uncertainty to wet-season precipitation process and raising the risk of extreme conditions. The findings of this study provide scientific references to water resources management, drought resistance, and disaster reduction.

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Data availability

Datasets related to this article can be found at the China Meteorological Data Service Centre [http://data.cma.cn], available upon reasonable request and permission of [http://data.cma.cn/].

Code availability

The materials and code used during this study can be made available upon reasonable request.

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Funding

This study was financially supported by the following contracts: the Major Science and Technology Projects of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (Grant 2020ZD0009); the Inner Mongolia Science and Technology Plan Project (Grant 2021GG0072, 2022YFSH0105, and 2021GG0071); the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant 51909122, 52269005, and 51769020); the Program for Young Science and Technology Talents in Higher Education Institution of Inner Mongolia (Grant NJYT 22037); Program for improving the Scientific Research Ability of Youth Teachers of Inner Mongolia Agricultural University (Grant BR220104); the Program of Constructing Inner Mongolia Key Laboratory of Protection and Utilization of Water Resources (Grant 2020PT0001); the Ministry of Education Innovative Research Team (Grant IRT_17R60); and the Ministry of Science and Technology Innovative Research Team in Priority Areas (Grant 2015RA4013). We are grateful to the various state and governmental agencies for providing so much data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Water Conservancy and Civil Engineering College, Inner Mongolia Key Laboratory of Protection and Utilization of Water Resources, Inner Mongolia Agricultural University, Zhaowuda Street 306, Saihan District, Hohhot, 010018, China

    Yixuan Wang, Limin Duan, Xin Tong, Tingxi Liu & Dongfang Li

  2. Ministry of Water Resources of the People’s Republic of China, Institute of Water Resource for Pastoral Area, Hohhot, 010018, Inner Mongolia, China

    Wei Li

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  1. Yixuan Wang
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  2. Limin Duan
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Yixuan Wang, Limin Duan, Xin Tong, and Tingxi Liu. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Yixuan Wang, and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Tingxi Liu.

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Wang, Y., Duan, L., Tong, X. et al. Non-stationary modeling of wet-season precipitation over the Inner Mongolia section of the Yellow River basin. Theor Appl Climatol 151, 389–405 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-022-04279-y

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