Acta Geographica Sinica ›› 2015, Vol. 70 ›› Issue (7): 1125-1136.doi: 10.11821/dlxb201507009

• Climate Change • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Changes of areal precipitation based on gridded dataset in Qilian Mountains during 1961-2012

Fang QIANG(), Mingjun ZHANG(), Shengjie WANG, Yangmin LIU, Zhengguo REN, Xiaofan ZHU   

  1. College of Geography and Environmental Science, Northwest Normal University, Lanzhou 730070, China
  • Received:2015-01-13 Revised:2015-04-12 Online:2015-07-20 Published:2015-07-20
  • Supported by:
    National Natural Science Foundation of China, No.41461003;National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program), No.2013CBA01801

Abstract:

Based on the 0.5°×0.5° daily gridded precipitation dataset and observations at meteorological stations released by the National Meteorological Information Center, the interannual variation of areal precipitation in the Qilian Mountains during 1961-2012 is investigated using principal component analysis (PCA) and regression analysis, and the relationship between areal precipitation anomaly and drought accumulation intensity is analyzed. The results indicate that the spatial distribution of precipitation in the Qilian Mountains can be well reflected by the gridded dataset. The gridded data-based precipitation in mountainous regions is generally larger than that in plain regions. Generally, there is more precipitation in the eastern section of the mountain range than in the western section. The annual mean areal precipitation in the Qilian Mountains is 724.9×108m3, and the seasonal means in spring, summer, autumn and winter are 118.9×108m3, 469.4×108m3, 122.5×108m3 and 14.1×108m3, respectively. Summer is a season with most areal precipitation, being approximately 64.76%. The areal precipitation in summer, autumn and winter shows an increasing trend, while spring presents a decreasing trend. Among the four seasons, summer has the largest trend magnitude of 1.7×108 m3 per year.

Key words: gridded dataset, areal precipitation, Qilian Mountains, principal component analysis, drought accumulation intensity