Warming hiatus of extreme temperature across China’s cold regions during 1998–2018

Abstract

The recent hiatus in global warming has attracted significant attention, yet whether it is a widespread global and/or regional phenomenon remains controversial. Here, we investigate the response of extreme temperature changes since 1961 across China’s cold regions (CCR): Tibetan determine the spatiotemporal characteristics of extreme temperature changes across these cold regions using Mann-Kendall and wavelet transform coherence (WTC) analyses of data from 196 meteorological stations from 1961 to 2018. We further investigate the teleconnection between extreme temperatures and large-scale ocean-atmosphere circulation to determine the potential synoptic scale causes of the observed changes. The results revealed a significant warming slowdown in all extreme temperature indices across CCR from 1998 to 2018. In addition, extreme temperature indices in northwest cold region (NWC) and north cold region (NC) reveal a clear winter warming slowdown and even a significant cooling trend, yet only the cold index in Tibetan platean cold region (TPC) shows a warming hiatus. We conclude that the warming hiatus observed across these regions is primarily driven by extreme temperature index changes in winter. We also find that phase variations in the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO) and Arctic Oscillation (AO) critically impact on the observed warming hiatus, but the specific atmospheric mechanisms are elusive and warrant further analysis and investigation.

Keywords

China’s cold regions / warming hiatus / wavelet transform coherence / ocean-atmosphere circulations

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