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Spatial and temporal trends of reference crop evapotranspiration and its influential variables in Yangtze River Delta, eastern China

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Abstract

Reference crop evapotranspiration (ETo) is one of the most important links in hydrologic circulation and greatly affects regional agricultural production and water resource management. Its variation has drawn more and more attention in the context of global warming. We used the Penman-Monteith method of the Food and Agriculture Organization, based on meteorological factors such as air temperature, sunshine duration, wind speed, and relative humidity to calculate the ETo over 46 meteorological stations located in the Yangtze River Delta, eastern China, from 1957 to 2014. The spatial distributions and temporal trends in ETo were analyzed based on the modified Mann-Kendall trend test and linear regression method, while ArcGIS software was employed to produce the distribution maps. The multiple stepwise regression method was applied in the analysis of the meteorological variable time series to identify the causes of any observed trends in ETo. The results indicated that annual ETo showed an obvious spatial pattern of higher values in the north than in the south. Annual increasing trends were found at 34 meteorological stations (73.91 % of the total), which were mainly located in the southeast. Among them, 12 (26.09 % of the total) stations showed significant trends. We saw a dominance of increasing trends in the monthly ETo except for January, February, and August. The high value zone of monthly ETo appeared in the northwest from February to June, mid-south area from July to August, and southeast coastal area from September to January. The research period was divided into two stages—stage I (1957–1989) and stage II (1990–2014)—to investigate the long-term temporal ETo variation. In stage I, almost 85 % of the total stations experienced decreasing trends, while more than half of the meteorological stations showed significant increasing trends in annual ETo during stage II except in February and September. Relative humidity, wind speed, and sunshine duration were identified as the most dominant meteorological variables influencing annual ETo changes. The results are expected to assist water resource managers and policy makers in making better planning decisions in the research region.

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Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the National Key Research and Development Plan of China (No. 2016YFC0401502), National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41371046), Commonweal and Specialized Program for Scientific Research, Ministry of Water Resources of China (No. 201201072), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (No. BK20131276), and the Water Conservancy Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (No. 2015003). Thanks to the National Meteorological Information Center, China Meteorological Administration for offering the meteorological data. The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviews and editor for their constructive criticism and valuable comments to improve the quality of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Geographic and Oceanographic Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

    Yu Xu, Youpeng Xu, Yuefeng Wang, Lei Wu, Guang Li & Song Song

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  1. Yu Xu
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  2. Youpeng Xu
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  3. Yuefeng Wang
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Correspondence to Youpeng Xu.

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Xu, Y., Xu, Y., Wang, Y. et al. Spatial and temporal trends of reference crop evapotranspiration and its influential variables in Yangtze River Delta, eastern China. Theor Appl Climatol 130, 945–958 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-016-1928-1

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