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Climate change or variability? The case of Yellow river as indicated by extreme maximum and minimum air temperature during 1960–2004

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Summary

The spatial and temporal variability of winter extreme low-temperature events and summer extreme high-temperature events was investigated using daily air temperature series (1960–2004) from 66 sites in the Yellow River basin, China, with the help of Mann–Kendall trend test method. In this study an extreme temperature event is defined by exceeding or falling below various threshold values of daily maximum and daily minimum air temperature: 90th percentile, 95th percentile for the high-temperature events; 10th percentile and 5th percentile for the low-temperature events. The analysis results indicate that: 1) significant upward trend of frequency and intensity of the high-temperature events is found in the stations in the west and north part of the Yellow River basin, but trends in most stations in the middle and lower Yellow River basin are not significant at >95% confidence level; 2) almost the whole Yellow River basin is dominated by the significant downward trend of frequency of the cold events. Stations featured by the increasing winter minimum temperature are also more than those featured by changing summer maximum temperature; and 3) annual warming trend in the Yellow River basin mainly results from the increase in winter minimum temperature. Significant warming in the upper reach of the Yellow River will be likely to threaten the availability of the water resource in the whole basin, which should draw certain concerns from local policy-makers and water resource management agency in the region.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography and Resource Management, Institute of Space and Earth Information Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong, China

    Q. Zhang & Y. D. Chen

  2. Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing, China

    Q. Zhang

  3. Laboratory for Climate Studies, National Climate Center, China Meteorological Administration, Beijing, China

    Q. Zhang & G. Ren

  4. Department of Geosciences, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    C.-Y. Xu

  5. Department of Earth Sciences, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

    C.-Y. Xu

  6. Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Forestry Ecological Engineering, Nanjing Forestry University, Nanjing, China

    Z. Zhang

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  1. Q. Zhang
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  2. C.-Y. Xu
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  3. Z. Zhang
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  4. G. Ren
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  5. Y. D. Chen
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Correspondence to Q. Zhang.

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Correspondence: Qiang Zhang, Department of Geography and Resource Management, Institute of Space and Earth Information Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, NT, Hong Kong, China

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Zhang, Q., Xu, CY., Zhang, Z. et al. Climate change or variability? The case of Yellow river as indicated by extreme maximum and minimum air temperature during 1960–2004. Theor Appl Climatol 93, 35–43 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-007-0328-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-007-0328-y

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