Abstract
It has been widely accepted that the global climate will change, with a ‘dry gets drier, wet gets wetter’ pattern. Recent studies found that such changes were overestimated. Drought/wetting variations were detected in a semiarid and sub-humid transitional region of China. The aridity index based on precipitation and reference evapotranspiration was applied to estimate drought/wetting variations. The results showed that the climate in the annual mean of the Zhangjiakou region showed a wetting trend from 1960 to 2017. The wetting trend also occurred in January, February, May and the wet season, especially in June, and in September, October, December and the dry season, and the wetting trend was significant. However, the drought trend occurred in March, April, July, August and November. Moreover, the most obvious wetting and drought changes occurred in September and August, respectively. Climate drought/wetting conditions are primarily driven by precipitation. Although increasing temperatures resulted in enhanced evaporation, precipitation increased, which could offset the increase in evaporation. In addition to precipitation and temperature, humidity was an important influencing factor on drought/wetting variation. The impact of humidity on drought/wetting conditions was greater than that of temperature in January, February, July, August and September. The influencing factors of drought/wetting variations are complicated in the Zhangjiakou region and are mainly influenced by the southeast monsoon, southwest monsoon and plateau monsoon in the Tibetan Plateau, westerly circulation and West Pacific subtropical high.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, and the Meteorology Information Centre of the Chinese National Bureau of Meteorology for permission to access the meteorological data.
Funding
This work was supported financially by the National Major Science and Technology Program for Water Pollution Control and Treatment of China (2017ZX07101001) and the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Science (XDA19040102).
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Zhou, Y., Lu, C. Drought/wetting variations in a semiarid and sub-humid region of China. Theor Appl Climatol 140, 1537–1548 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-020-03171-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-020-03171-x