Climatic Change Characteristics towards the “Warming–Wetting” Trend in the Pan-Central-Asia Arid Region

Abstract

In recent years, the warming–wetting trend in the arid region of Northwest China has attracted widespread attention. To reveal whether this phenomenon exists in the whole Pan-Central-Asia arid region, this paper adopts the latest monthly gridded dataset of the Climate Research Unit Time Series version 4.05 (CRU TS v4.05) and the multi-model ensemble data of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CIMP6) for discussion from multiple perspectives. The results show that the Pan-Central-Asia arid region has been getting warmer and wetter in the last 80 years. Since the turn of the 21st century, there has been an apparent slowdown in the regional wetting trend despite the acceleration of precipitation increase, mainly caused by the growth in evapotranspiration potential. The interannual scale dominates the precipitation change, including significant quasi-three-year and quasi-six-year cycles. The interannual variability in precipitation is mainly affected by the change in the phases of Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO), while long-term variation dominates the temperature change, which is significantly related to the variations in the Arctic oscillation (AO). Thus, future research and predictions of regional precipitation should focus on the PDO variations, followed by the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI), whereas for research on, and predictions of, temperature, the effect of AO variations should be emphasized. Except for a few regions in Central-Eastern Mongolia and Central Kazakhstan, precipitation levels in most parts of the Pan-Central-Asia region have been increasing. The regional temperature exhibits a distribution pattern which decreases from northwest to southeast. The increase in precipitation in the Pan-Central-Asia arid region alleviates the drought in most regions, including most of Northwest China. However, the arid and semi-arid climate patterns in this region have not changed. The warming–wetting trend will significantly accelerate in medium-emissions scenarios in the next 80 years. Although the increase in precipitation may be a positive aspect of this trend, the rise in potential evapotranspiration caused by sharp warming may cause greater challenges to the regional climate and ecological environment.