Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2020
DOI
10.3390/w12010074
Publication Title
Water
Volume
12
Pages
74 (1-17)
Abstract
Understanding historical trends in temperature, precipitation, and runoff is important but incomplete for developing adaptive measures to climate change to sustain fragile ecosystems in cold and arid regions, including the Balagaer River watershed on the Mongolian Plateau of northeast China. The objective of this study was to detect such trends in this watershed from 1959 to 2017. The detection was accomplished using a Mann-Kendall sudden change approach at annual and seasonal time scales. The results indicated that the abrupt changes in temperature preceded that in either runoff or precipitation; these abrupt changes occurred between 1970 and 2004. Significant (α = 0.05) warming trends were found at the minimum temperatures in spring (0.041 °C a−1), summer (0.037 °C a−1), fall (0.027 °C a−1), and winter (0.031 °C a−1). In contrast, significant decreasing trends were found in the precipitation (−1.27 mm a−1) and runoff (−0.069 mm a−1) in the summer. Marginally increasing trends were found in the precipitation in spring (0.18 mm a−1) and fall (0.032 mm a−1), whereas an insignificant decreasing trend was found in the runoffs in these two seasons. Both precipitation and runoff in the wet season exhibited a significant decreasing trend, whereas in the dry season, they exhibited a marginally increasing trend. Sudden changes in spring runoff and sudden rises in temperature are the main causes of sudden changes in basin rainfall.
ORCID
0000-0003-3455-3124 (Wang)
Original Publication Citation
Zhang, A., Gao, R., Wang, X., Liu, T., & Fang, L. (2020). Historical trends in air temperature, precipitation, and runoff of a plateau inland river watershed in North China. Water, 12, 74. doi:10.3390/w12010074
Repository Citation
Zhang, Along; Gao, Ruizhong; Wang, Xixi; Liu, Tingxi; and Fang, Lijing, "Historical Trends in Air Temperature, Precipitation, and Runoff of a Plateau Inland River Watershed in North China" (2020). Civil & Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications. 36.
https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/cee_fac_pubs/36
Comments
© 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).