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The spatial and temporal analysis of precipitation concentration and dry spell in Qinghai, northwest China

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Abstract

Understanding precipitation variations from various aspects is important for the assessment of drought risk and the utilization of water resources. The precipitation concentration index (PCI) and the concentration index (CI) were used to investigate/quantify the heterogeneity of the monthly and daily rainfall in Qinghai province that is part of northwestern China, respectively. The precipitation concentration in Qinghai shows a significant irregularity of the monthly rainfall distribution and highly homogeneous distribution of the daily rainfall. It is found that PCI and CI show negative trends at most stations. Meanwhile, the spatial and temporal variation of nine dry spell (DS) indices are analyzed. From the spatial perspective, drought in the northwestern area is much severer than that in other areas of Qinghai. According to the results of temporal analysis by using the Mann–Kendall test, the number of very long DSs, maximum length of DS, mean length of DSs, and the total dry days of extreme DS all decrease. All these results verify that the warm dry climatic pattern in Qinghai can be changed into the warm wet climatic pattern.

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Acknowledgments

This paper was financially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos.: 51109109, 41375006), National Basic Research Program of China (No.: 31200534). We would like to thank the National Climate Centre (NCC) in Beijing for providing valuable climate data sets.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Applied Meteorology, Jiangsu Collaborative Innovation Center of Atmospheric Environment and Equipment Technology, Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Agricultural Meteorology, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, Nanjing, 210044, China

    Jin Huang

  2. School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Jiangsu Collaborative Innovation Center of Atmospheric Environment and Equipment Technology, Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Atmospheric Environment Monitoring and Pollution Control, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, Nanjing, 210044, China

    Jin Huang, Fengling Liu & Yan Xue

  3. Applied Hydrometeorological Research Institute, Key Laboratory of Meteorological Disaster of Ministry of Education, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, Nanjing, 210044, China

    Shanlei Sun

Authors
  1. Jin Huang
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  2. Fengling Liu
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  3. Yan Xue
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  4. Shanlei Sun
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Correspondence to Yan Xue.

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Huang, J., Liu, F., Xue, Y. et al. The spatial and temporal analysis of precipitation concentration and dry spell in Qinghai, northwest China. Stoch Environ Res Risk Assess 29, 1403–1411 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00477-015-1051-3

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