Abstract
The uncertainty in trend estimates caused by temporal scale effect has rarely been studied. In response to this challenge, this study aims to explore temporal scale effects on trend detection based on in situ measurements throughout China given that they provide full temporal details of surface elements. Three common temporal scales (daily, monthly, and yearly) were used to present findings. Two different trend detection methods (i.e., simple linear regression and breaks for additive seasonal and trend) were employed to check the dependence of temporal scale effects on methods. It was found that temporal scale effects were dependent on the type of elements, the time span of datasets, and trend detection methods. They are more significant for elements with fast changes (e.g., snow depth) compared to those with gradual changes (e.g., albedo, air temperature). And temporal scale effects from daily to monthly scale are generally larger than those from monthly to yearly scale. The former is almost independent of trend detection methods, while the latter shows a clear dependence (i.e., dealing with seasonality or not). Trend estimates of surface albedo and longwave net radiation are mainly affected by temporal scale effects, while those of snow depth, shortwave net radiation, and air temperature are affected by both temporal scale effects and the choice of trend detection methods. The feedbacks between these elements show a clear dependence on temporal scale, which are generally stronger on monthly scale but weaker on yearly scale.
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Data availability
The in situ snow depth data are provided by the China Meteorology Administration (CMA) (https://data.cma.cn/en), which are not available to the public due to legal constraints on the data’s availability.
Code availability
The study primarily used the following R packages: bfast and nlme.
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Acknowledgements
The in situ data were provided by the China Meteorology Administration (CMA) (https://data.cma.cn/en). Data analysis was conducted using R programming languages.
Funding
This work was jointly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 42071296 and 41801226) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (lzujbky-2020–72).
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection, and analysis were performed by Xiaodan Wu, Dujuan Ma, and Jingping Wang. The draft of the manuscript was written by Xiaodan Wu. Tingjun Zhang commented on it for its improvement. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Wu, X., Ma, D., Wang, J. et al. Temporal scale effects on trend estimates for solar radiation, thermal and snow conditions, and their feedbacks: the case from China. Theor Appl Climatol 146, 869–882 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-021-03761-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-021-03761-3