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Chin. Phys. B, 2014, Vol. 23(4): 049201    DOI: 10.1088/1674-1056/23/4/049201
GEOPHYSICS, ASTRONOMY, AND ASTROPHYSICS Prev  

Early warning signals of abrupt temperature change in different regions of China over the past 50 years

Tong Ji-Long (仝纪龙)a, Wu Hao (吴浩)a b, Hou Wei (侯威)c, He Wen-Ping (何文平)c, Zhou Jie (周杰)b
a Key Laboratory for Semi-Arid Climate Change of the Ministry of Education, College of Atmospheric Sciences,Lanzhou University, Lanzhou 730000, China;
b College of Physical Science and Technology, Yangzhou University, Yangzhou 225002, China;
c National Climate Center, Beijing 100081, China
Abstract  In this paper, the early warning signals of abrupt temperature change in different regions of China are investigated. Seven regions are divided on the basis of different climate temperature patterns, obtained through the rotated empirical orthogonal function, and the signal-to-noise temperature ratios for each region are then calculated. Based on the concept of critical slowing down, the temperature data that contain noise in the different regions of China are preprocessed to study the early warning signals of abrupt climate change. First, the Mann-Kendall method is used to identify the instant of abrupt climate change in the temperature data. Second, autocorrelation coefficients that can identify critical slowing down are calculated. The results show that the critical slowing down phenomenon appeared in temperature data about 5-10 years before abrupt climate change occurred, which indicates that the critical slowing down phenomenon is a possible early warning signal for abrupt climate change, and that noise has less influence on the detection results of the early warning signals. Accordingly, this demonstrates that the model is reliable in identifying the early warning signals of abrupt climate change based on detecting the critical slowing down phenomenon, which provides an experimental basis for the actual application of the method.
Keywords:  abrupt climate change      critical slowing down      rotated empirical orthogonal function      early warning signal  
Received:  17 June 2013      Revised:  08 August 2013      Accepted manuscript online: 
PACS:  92.70.Aa (Abrupt/rapid climate change)  
Fund: Project supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (Grant Nos. 2012CB955902 and 2013CB430204), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 41175067, 41275074, and 41105033), and the Special Scientific ResearchProject for Public Interest, China (Grant No. GYHY201106015).
Corresponding Authors:  Wu Hao     E-mail:  wuhaophy@163.com
About author:  92.70.Aa

Cite this article: 

Tong Ji-Long (仝纪龙), Wu Hao (吴浩), Hou Wei (侯威), He Wen-Ping (何文平), Zhou Jie (周杰) Early warning signals of abrupt temperature change in different regions of China over the past 50 years 2014 Chin. Phys. B 23 049201

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