Aerosol characteristics and impacts on weather and climate over the Tibetan Plateau

Does the climate warming hiatus exist over the Tibetan Plateau?

The surface air temperature change over the Tibetan Plateau is determined based on historical observations from 1980 to 2013. In contrast to the cooling trend in the rest of China, and the global warming hiatus post-1990s, an accelerated warming trend has appeared over the Tibetan Plateau during 1998-2013 (0.25 °C decade(-1)), compared with that during 1980-1997 (0.21 °C decade(-1)). Further re...

Aerosol optical depth over the Tibetan Plateau and its relation to aerosols over the Taklimakan Desert

[1] The Multiangle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) aerosol optical depths (AODs) over the Tibetan Plateau (TP) are compared with ground-based remote sensing data. The result shows that 27 out of 32 MISR AODs fall within the expected uncertainty, i.e., 0.05 or 20% AOD. The mean bias and the root mean square error between ground and satellite AODs are 0.01 and 0.03, respectively. The 7-year MISR...

Characteristics and Scenarios Projection of Climate Change on the Tibetan Plateau

The Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR4) presents twenty-two global climate models (GCMs). In this paper, we evaluate the ability of 22 GCMs to reproduce temperature and precipitation over the Tibetan Plateau by comparing with ground observations for 1961~1900. The results suggest that all the GCMs underestimate surface air temperature and most mo...

Weather and Climate Impacts on Beef Cattle

Precipitation impacts on vegetation spring phenology on the Tibetan Plateau.

The ongoing changes in vegetation spring phenology in temperate/cold regions are widely attributed to temperature. However, in arid/semiarid ecosystems, the correlation between spring temperature and phenology is much less clear. We test the hypothesis that precipitation plays an important role in the temperature dependency of phenology in arid/semiarid regions. We therefore investigated the in...