Hydrological processes depend directly on climate conditions [e.g., precipitation, potential evapotranspiration (PE)] based on the water balance. This paper examines streamflow datasets at four hydrological stations and meteorological observations at 79 weather stations to reveal the streamflow changes and underlying drivers in four typical watersheds (Meigang, Saitang, Gaosha, and Xiashan) wit...

Changes in precipitation could have crucial influences on the regional water resources in arid regions such as Xinjiang. It is necessary to understand the intrinsic multi-scale variations of precipitation in different parts of Xinjiang in the context of climate change. In this study, based on precipitation data from 53 meteorological stations in Xinjiang during 1960-2012, we investigated the in...

Secular trends of daily precipitation characteristics are considered in the transient climate change experiment with a coupled atmosphere–ocean general circulation model ECHAM4/OPYC3 for 1900–2099. The climate forcing is due to increasing concentrations of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Mean daily precipitation, precipitation intensity, probability of wet days and parameters of the gam...

The climate change in Shandong Peninsula, China was analyzed in this paper by the non-parametric Mann-Kendall test, Accumulated Difference Curve and Order Cluster Analysis methods, based upon the datas of annual mean, maximum and minimum temperature and annual precipitation, precipitation from June to September over the past 50 years. Results obtained showed a number of observations: 1) The ann...

Available energy (often expressed in terms of potential evaporation) and precipitation largely determine annual evapotranspiration and runoff rates in a region. The ratio of annual potential evaporation to precipitation, referred to as the aridity index by Budyko, has been shown to describe the evaporation ratio (the ratio of annual evapotranspiration to precipitation) of catchments from a rang...

Future changes in the number of dry days per year can either reinforce or counteract projected increases in daily precipitation intensity as the climate warms. We analyze climate model projected changes in the number of dry days using 28 coupled global climate models from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, version 5 (CMIP5). We find that the Mediterranean Sea region, parts of Central an...

Increases in the severity and frequency of drought in a warming climate may negatively impact agricultural production and food security. Unlike previous studies that have estimated agricultural impacts of climate condition using single-crop yield distributions, we develop a multivariate probabilistic model that uses projected climatic conditions (e.g., precipitation amount or soil moisture) thr...