Central Asia’s Changing Climate: How Temperature and Precipitation Have Changed across Time, Space, and Altitude

Abstract

Changes in climate can be favorable as well as detrimental for natural and anthropogenic systems. Temperatures in Central Asia have risen significantly within the last decades whereas mean precipitation remains almost unchanged. However, climatic trends can vary greatly between different subregions, across altitudinal levels, and within seasons. Investigating in the seasonally and spatially differentiated trend characteristics amplifies the knowledge of regional climate change and fosters the understanding of potential impacts on social, ecological, and natural systems. Considering the known limitations of available climate data in this region, this study combines both high-resolution and long-term records to achieve the best possible results. Temperature and precipitation data were analyzed using Climatic Research Unit (CRU) TS 4.01 and NASA’s Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) 3B43. To study long-term trends and low-frequency variations, we performed a linear trend analysis and compiled anomaly time series and regional grid-based trend maps. The results show a strong increase in temperature, almost uniform across the topographically complex study site, with particular maxima in winter and spring. Precipitation depicts minor positive trends, except for spring when precipitation is decreasing. Expected differences in the development of temperature and precipitation between mountain areas and plains could not be detected.

Comparison of historical and recent accumulation rates on Abramov Glacier, Pamir Alay

“…Our results suggest that the accumulation area of Abramov Glacier is affected by this precipitation increase. Furthermore, Haag and others (2019) show that Abramov Glacier is located on the edge of a region with positive precipitation trends for 1950–2016. The effect of a precipitation increase, however, cannot fully compensate for the increase of available melt energy at the low(er) elevation Abramov Glacier.…”

“…According to regional trends from the gridded data product Climatic Research Unit TS 4.01 for 1950–2016, air temperatures in Central Asia continued to increase after the 1970s and 1980s (Haag and others, 2019). In the context of increasing air temperatures, a recent increase of melt rates in the accumulation area of Abramov Glacier is likely.…”

Measurements meet human observations: integrating distinctive ways of knowing in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan to assess local climate change

“…Questions were identical to the interview questions of 2018 and can be found in Online Resource 1. Workshops were further used to share scientific information about regional climate trends with the community members to initiate a two-way learning process (Haag et al, 2019). The workshops were conducted in the homes of village leaders and were always started with a shared meal.…”

Examining Fractional Vegetation Cover Dynamics in Response to Climate from 1982 to 2015 in the Amur River Basin for SDG 13

“…In this study, the Climatic Research Unit Time Series 4.01 (CRU TS4.01, available at http://date.ceada.ac.uk/badc/cru/data/) meteorological dataset with a spatial resolution of 0.5 • was applied to obtain the monthly air temperature (TMP) and monthly precipitation (PRE) datasets from 1982 to 2015 for the ARB. The CRU dataset was produced by the Climate Research Unit, University of East Anglia, and has been used in a number of studies on climate change or vegetation growth [13,21,22]. The spatial resolution of temperature and precipitation data was resampled to 8 km using the nearest neighbor method when we explored the effects of climatic factors on FVC.…”