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Assessment of the uncertainties in temperature change in China during the last century

  • Articles
  • Special Topic Climate Changes in the Past Century
  • Published:
Chinese Science Bulletin

Abstract

We have used the China Homogenized Historic Temperature dataset and some long-term station series of the neighbor countries from CRUTEM3, a 5°×5° gridded dataset of monthly mean temperature since 1900, to provide a 107-year record of surface temperature trends and variability. We derived a comprehensive set of uncertainty estimates to accompany the data: measurement and sampling errors, uncertainties in temperature bias estimates, and uncertainties arising from limited observational coverage on large-scale averages have all been estimated. We reanalysed the temperature changes during the period of record. The best estimates of trends for 1900–2006 with uncertainties at 95% confidence range are about 0.09±0.017°C/decade for the year as a whole, and 0.14±0.021°C/decade, 0.11±0.021°C/decade, 0.04±0.017°C/decade, and 0.07±0.017°C/decade for winter, spring, summer and autumn respectively. For 1954–2006, the trends for annual, winter, spring, summer and autumn are: 0.26±0.032°C/decade, 0.35±0.046°C/decade, 0.25±0.051°C/decade, 0.16±0.037°C/decade and 0.22±0.055°C/decade. Winter saw the most significant warming trend in both 1900–2006 and 1954–2006, while during the most recent period (the satellite era, 1979–2006), all the seasons show similar warming trends: 0.45±0.13°C/decade, 0.51±0.11°C/decade, 0.52±0.16°C/decade, 0.37±0.10°C/decade and 0.50±0.16°C/decade for annual, winter, spring, summer and autumn. Trends arising from urbanization have been evaluated as less than 5% of the total warming trend for 1951–2001, so this bias was not removed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Meteorological Information Center, Beijing, 100081, China

    QingXiang Li & XiaoRong Gao

  2. Laboratory of Surface Process and Resources Economies, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China

    WenJie Dong

  3. National Meteorological Center, Beijing, 100081, China

    Wei Li

  4. Climatic Research Unit, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, NR4 7TJ, UK

    P. Jones

  5. Met Office Hadley Centre, Exeter, EX1 3PB, UK

    J. Kennedy & D. Parker

Authors
  1. QingXiang Li
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  2. WenJie Dong
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  3. Wei Li
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  4. XiaoRong Gao
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  5. P. Jones
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  6. J. Kennedy
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  7. D. Parker
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Correspondence to QingXiang Li.

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Li, Q., Dong, W., Li, W. et al. Assessment of the uncertainties in temperature change in China during the last century. Chin. Sci. Bull. 55, 1974–1982 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11434-010-3209-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11434-010-3209-1

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