Abstract
Drylands, where the water supplies are scarce relative to the atmospheric moisture demands, occupy approximately half of the area of China. With global warming, the response of atmospheric water cycle is a crucial concern for sustainable development in China’s drylands. This study investigates the characteristics of the water cycle in China’s drylands during 1980–2019, as well as future projections estimated by the Community Earth System Model (CESM) during 2020–2100. The results show that the air temperature in China’s drylands has increased significantly since 1980, especially after 2000, with greater warming in the warm season. Meanwhile, China generally tend to be drier from 1980 to 2019 as a whole, especially in the cold season. Both precipitation (P) and evapotranspiration (E) have increased, but the net effect is that drylands become drier (negative P-E) and wetlands become wetter (positive P-E), respectively. In the future, drylands are projected to become more humid due to increased precipitation, showing a pattern of “western wetter and eastern drier” during 2020–2100. These results could improve understanding of the water cycle and provide some guidance for adapting to climate change in drylands.
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https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/hrg/cru_ts_4.05/https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.gpcp.htmlhttps://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.cmap.htmlhttp://apdrc.soest.hawaii.edu/las/v6/constrain?var=12581https://goldsmr4.gesdisc.eosdis.nasa.gov/data/MERRA2_MONTHLYhttp://data.cma.cn. GLEAM datasets are available at https://www.gleam.eu/.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41991231), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (lzujbky-2022-kb11), and the Foundation of Key Laboratory for Semi-Arid Climate Change of the Ministry of Education in Lanzhou University.
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This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41991231), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (lzujbky-2022-kb11), and the Foundation of Key Laboratory for Semi-Arid Climate Change of the Ministry of Education in Lanzhou University.
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. J. G. performed analysis and written the first draft of the manuscript. Acquisition of data and the creation of new software used in the work were performed by M. L. and J. G. Y. L., Z. T. and M. L. revised it critically for important intellectual content. All authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Gao¹, J., Luo¹, M., Tan, Z. et al. Distinct response of atmospheric water cycle in China drylands. Theor Appl Climatol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-024-05016-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-024-05016-3