Abstract
The Arctic polar vortex (APV) system plays an important role in controlling winter and spring atmospheric circulation pattern in China. Here, we evaluate the anomalous APV-induced spring vegetation variability and lagged productivity responses in China. We found that both strong and weak APV conditions have almost equally negative impacts on spring vegetation growth in China, e.g., negative NDVI anomalies occurred in 48.6 and 53.2% of China’s vegetated areas under strong and weak APV conditions, respectively. However, large seasonal compensation effects were associated with weak APV conditions, and beneficial lagged vegetation productivity responses occurred in 67.2% of China’s vegetated areas, whereas adverse responses occurred in only 32.8% of vegetated areas. Under a strong APV, adverse lagged vegetation productivity responses occurred in 54.5% of China’s vegetated areas, whereas beneficial responses occurred in only 45.5% of vegetated areas. The temperature, precipitation, and solar radiation changes caused by anomalous APV-induced changes in circulation patterns are the main reasons for spring vegetation variability. The lagged vegetation productivity responses were attributed to anomalous APV-related precipitation and air temperature anomalies in the following summer and autumn. This improved understanding of the strong links between APV anomalies and vegetation dynamics in China should facilitate early warning of vegetation productivity reductions under anomalous APV conditions.
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The NDVI data were obtained from the Global Inventory Monitoring and Modeling Studies (GIMMS) (https://ecocast.arc.nasa.gov/data/pub/gimms/3g.v1). The monthly mean precipitation (mm) and surface air temperature (°C) were obtained from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) (http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk). The monthly mean geopotential height (gpm), wind speed (m/s), and solar radiation (W/m2) were downloaded from NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis Project at the NOAA/ESRL Physical Sciences Laboratory (https://psl.noaa.gov/data/reanalysis/reanalysis.shtml). The observed GPP values (g/m2) were obtained from ChinaFLUX (http://www.chinaflux.org/).
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the editor and reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. We thank the scientific teams for Climatic Research Unit (University of East Anglia) and NCAS, NASA, the NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis Project, and the ChinaFLUX. We would like to thank these agencies for providing the data for our work.
Funding
This study is supported by the Science and Technology Basic Resources Investigation Program of China (2017FY101301), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2017YFC0503905), and the Chinese National Natural Science Fund (41971135).
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He Gong performed the data analyses and wrote the manuscript. Mei Huang contributed to the conception of the study and modified the manuscript. Zhaosheng Wang collected the data. Shaoqiang Wang gave some suggestions for modification. Fengxue Gu helped perform the analysis with constructive discussions.
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Gong, H., Huang, M., Wang, Z. et al. Anomalous arctic polar vortex-induced spring vegetation variability and lagged productivity responses in China. Theor Appl Climatol 145, 261–272 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-021-03632-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-021-03632-x