[1] Changes in indices of climate extremes are studied on the basis of daily series of temperature and precipitation observations from 116 meteorological stations in central and south Asia. Averaged over all stations, the indices of temperature extremes indicate warming of both the cold tail and the warm tail of the distributions of daily minimum and maximum temperature between 1961 and 2000. For precipitation, most regional indices of wet extremes show little change in this period as a result of low spatial trend coherence with mixed positive and negative station trends. Relative to the changes in the total amounts, there is a slight indication of disproportionate changes in the precipitation extremes. Stations with near-complete data for the longer period of 1901-2000 suggest that the recent trends in extremes of minimum temperature are consistent with long-term trends, whereas the recent trends in extremes of maximum temperature are part of multidecadal climate variability.

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Autumn rain of West China is a typical climate phenomenon, which is characterized by continuous rainy days and large rainfall amounts and exerts profound impacts on the economic society. Based on daily precipitation data from 524 observation stations for the period of 1961-2014, this article comprehensively examined secular changes in autumn rain of West China, including its amount, frequency, intensity, and associated extremes. The results generally show a significant reduction of rainfall amount and rainy days and a significant enhancement of mean rainfall intensity for the average of West China during autumn (SeptemberOctober) since 1961. Meanwhile, decreasing trends are consistently observed in the maximum daily rainfall, the longest consecutive rainy days, the greatest consecutive rainfall amount, and the frequencies of the extreme daily rainfall, consecutive rainfall, and consecutive rainfall process. Further analysis indicates that the decreases of autumn rainfall and related extremes in West China are associated with the decreases in both water vapor content and atmospheric unstable stratification during the past decades. On the regional scale, some differences exist in the changes of autumn rainfall between the eastern and western parts of West China. Besides, it is found that the autumn rainy season tends to start later and terminate earlier particularly in eastern West China.

Based on monthly averaged surface air temperature data of 733 stations in China during 1951~2002, after rejecting 86 stations in the large cities, the consistency and difference of the trends in surface air temperatures over eastern, western China and Qinghai‐Tibet Plateau were analyzed and their causes were discussed. The results show that there are close connections and consistency in variations of annual and seasonal mean surface air temperatures in eastern and western China. Warming trends are all significant in eastern and western China with a rate of 0.26°C/10a in eastern China and 0.18°C/10a in western China respectively. Seasonally, mean temperatures also tended warming up but the warmest trends were found in winter in both eastern and western China. The annual mean warming trend in eastern China is more obvious than that in western China. In winter and spring, warming trends in eastern China are greater than those in the Qinghai‐Tibet Plateau and western China, while in summer and autumn, they are smaller in eastern China. The consistency of warming trend in eastern and western China suggests that surface air temperature in eastern and western China are both influenced under global warming background. Whereas, the fact that warming trend in eastern China is more obvious than that in western China implies that topography also plays an important role in regional temperature variation.

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