Daily spatial temperature range: Spatiotemporal pattern and climate change response

Abstract

Due to its impact on cereal yields, vegetation growth, animal wellbeing, and human health, considerable attention has been paid to diurnal temperature range, focusing on the temporal dimension of surface air temperature. However, the characteristics of spatial temperature range and its response to climate change remain unclear, despite its importance to various natural and societal activities. Here, we proposed a daily spatial temperature range (DSTR, difference between spatial maximum and minimum temperature, STmax and STmin) indicator to measure the maximum spatial temperature range within a given region over a day. We analyzed the spatiotemporal pattern of DSTR and its trend under climate change at four scales (global, hemispheric, national, and provincial), with the following main results: (1) DSTR was scale dependent, provincial pattern of which were mainly related to sensible and latent heat fluxes. (2) The key regions affecting DSTR and temporal distribution at different scales were mapped out. (3) Under climate change, DSTR significantly decreased globally, hemispherically, and in several Chinese provinces due to the greater warming of STmin than STmax. The influence of latent heat flux and solar shortwave radiation was larger at global/hemispheric scales, while the albedo was a more critical driver at provincial scale. For the first time, we proposed the DSTR indicator and emphasized the importance of exploring spatial temperature heterogeneity. This spatial information is important to optimize relevant societal activities, and the response of DSTR to climate change has further led to the consideration of the relationship between DSTR and extreme events, biodiversity, etc.

Keywords

Diurnal temperature range / Daily spatial temperature range / Spatial temperature heterogeneity / Spatiotemporal distribution / Climate change

Software availability statement

The computations and visualizations were performed using Python 3.10.0, available at https://www.python.org. The code is available at https://github.com/FayongLiu/Daily_spatial_temperature_range.git.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Fayong Liu: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Visualization, Validation, Software, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Data curation. Xinyu Zou: Writing – review & editing, Software, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis. Yuanyuan Huang: Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Resources, Project administration, Methodology, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization.

Declaration of competing interests

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.

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the financial support from the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2023YFB3907402), the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Category B, Geographic Intelligence, Grant No. XDB0740300), and the Postdoctoral Fellowship Program of China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant No. GZC20241691).

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2025.100319.

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