Long-term spatio-temporal precipitation variations in China with precipitation surface interpolated by ANUSPLIN

Abstract

Climate changes significantly impact environmental and hydrological processes. Precipitation is one of the most significant climatic parameters and its variability and trends have great influences on environmental and socioeconomic development. We investigate the spatio-temporal variability of precipitation occurrence frequency, mean precipitation depth, PVI and total precipitation in China based on long-term precipitation series from 1961 to 2015. As China's topography is diverse and precipitation is affected by topography strongly, ANUSPLIN can model the effect of topography on precipitation effectively is adopted to generate the precipitation interpolation surface. Mann-Kendall trend analysis and simple linear regression was adopted to examine long-term trend for these indicators. The results indicate ANUSPLIN precipitation surface is reliable and the precipitation variation show different regional and seasonal trend. For example, there is a sporadic with decreasing frequency precipitation trend in spring and a uniform with increasing frequency trend in summer in Yangtze Plain, which may affect spring ploughing and alteration of flood risk for this main rice-production areas of China. In northwestern China, there is a uniform with increasing precipitation frequency and intensity trend, which is beneficial for this arid region. Our study could be helpful for other counties with similar climate types. Climate changes, including change in regional precipitation pattern, have modified hydrological processes and will continue to reshape the hydrology. Precipitation is an important meteorological parameter, and is a key player in regional hydrological processes 1,2. It is an important natural source of water for vegetation, especially in dry regions, and its variability and trends have great influences on plant growth and crop production. Variation in total quantity and temporal variability of precipitation has significant effect on soil water supply, water stress as well as metabolic and physiological functions of vegetation, further determined the impact of precipitation variability on ecosystem structure 3. It is of practical interest to access how climate changes have altered precipitation spatially and temporally and therefore to improve our insight into precipitation variability analyses. Gauge-based precipitation is the main data source for precipitation. However, in situ precipitation data of rain gauge station are not always available. As precipitation measurements are scarce and the measuring stations are distributed unevenly in space, the rain gauge network might be inefficient in demonstrating the spatial distribution of precipitation and capturing precipitation events completely. Consequently, interpolation is introduced to examine the spatial distribution of precipitation. To assess the spatial variability and trends of precipitation indicators, the procedures of spatial interpolation broadly included two strategies, interpolating of the station indices directly and interpolating of the precipitation a...

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