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Have China’s drylands become wetting in the past 50 years?

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Abstract

Recently, whether drylands of Northwest China (NW) have become wetting has been attracting surging attentions. By comparing the Standard Precipitation Evapotranspiration Indices (SPEI) derived from two different potential evapotranspiration estimates, i.e., the Thornthwaite algorithm (SPEI_th) and the Penman-Monteith equation (SPEI_pm), we try to resolve the controversy. The analysis indicated that air temperature has been warming significantly at a rate of 0.4°C decade−1 in the last five decades and the more arid areas are more prone to becoming warmer. Annual precipitation of the entire study area increased insignificantly by 3.6 mm decade−1 from 1970 to 2019 but NW presented significantly increasing trends. Further, the SPEI_th and SPEI_pm demonstrated similar wetting-drying-wetting trends (three phases) in China’s drylands during 1970–2019. The common periodical signals in the middle phase were identified both by SPEI_th and SPEI_pm wavelet analysis. Analysis with different temporal intervals can lead to divergent or even opposite results. The attribution analysis revealed that precipitation is the main climatic factor driving the drought trend transition. This study hints that the wetting trend’s direction and magnitude hinge on the targeted temporal periods and regions.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to the National Meteorological Information Center of China Meteorological Administration for archiving the observed data. Great thanks to the editors and anonymous reviewers for providing valuable comments that significantly improved this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Ecosystem Network Observation and Modeling, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, CAS, Beijing, 100101, China

    Yu Zhang, Yangjian Zhang, Nan Cong, Zhoutao Zheng, Ke Huang, Jianshuang Zhang, Yixuan Zhu, Jie Gao & Yihan Sun

  2. College of Resources and Environment, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Yu Zhang, Yangjian Zhang, Yixuan Zhu, Jie Gao & Yihan Sun

  3. College of Life Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China

    Yu Zhang

  4. CAS Center for Excellence in Tibetan Plateau Earth Science, Beijing, 100101, China

    Yangjian Zhang

  5. Beijing Applied Atmospheric Institute, Beijing, 100029, China

    Liang Cheng

  6. Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, 1350, Denmark

    Ke Huang

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  1. Yu Zhang
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  2. Yangjian Zhang
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  3. Liang Cheng
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  4. Nan Cong
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  9. Jie Gao
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  10. Yihan Sun
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Correspondence to Yangjian Zhang.

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Foundation

The Major Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China, No.41991234; The National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars, No.41725003

Author

Zhang Yu, PhD Candidate, specialized in global change ecology. E-mail: zhangyu0041@igsnrr.ac.cn

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Data availability statement

All observation data used in this study are available at http://data.cma.cn. The CRU data can be accessed at http://data.ceda.ac.uk/badc/cru/data.

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Zhang, Y., Zhang, Y., Cheng, L. et al. Have China’s drylands become wetting in the past 50 years?. J. Geogr. Sci. 33, 99–120 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11442-022-2067-5

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