Due to global warming, the lengths of the four seasons, which are always taken as constant values, have experienced significant variations with rising temperature. Such changes play different roles on regional climate change, with the most significant effect on drylands. To guarantee local crop yields and preserve ecosystems, the identification of the changes of the four seasons in drylands is important. Our results show that, relative to humid lands, changing trends in lengths of spring, summer and autumn were particularly enhanced in drylands of the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes during 1951-2020. In this period, summer length has increased by 0.51 day per year, while spring and autumn lengths have contracted by 0.14 and 0.14 day per year, respectively. However, the enhanced changes in drylands did not appear in winter length. Such changes of spring, summer and autumn in drylands are dominated by internal variability over the entire study period, with a stronger external forcing effect on drylands than on humid lands. In drylands, the external forcing contributed to the changes in lengths of spring, summer and autumn by 30.1%, 42.2% and 29.4%, respectively. The external forcing has become an increasingly important component since 1990, with the ability to dominate all seasons in drylands after 2010. Nevertheless, only one out of the 16 Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) models used in this study can capture the enhanced changes in the lengths of spring, summer and autumn in drylands. Further investigation on the local effects of changes in seasons on agriculture and ecosystem would be needed, especially for the fragile regions.
In recent decades, a high frequency of extreme high temperature has occurred in many regions worldwide with serious impacts on society and the economy. As the temperature increases, the sensitivity of extreme high temperatures to changing thresholds in the northern mid-latitudes exhibits a different performance response. The results of this study show that extreme high temperature in the increasing phase is more sensitive to changes in the threshold in both observations and simulations (the largest difference in the speed of temperature increase occurs at 3.5 days and 25 days/decade), primarily in North America and Central Asia. However, obvious discrepancy appears in the time series before 1980 and the spatial scale over North America between BEST and HadGHCND dataset. This finding highlight that the old definition of being in the increasing temperature phase in modern climate history is problematic today. At the same time, when the old base period is selected, the frequency of extreme high temperatures will become a common event (close to 98% in a year) by 2100. Using 1961-1990 as the base period is not suitable for calculating extreme temperatures in the future from the perspective of adapting to climate change. The increasing temperature threshold means there will be more frequent hot days, indicating that agriculture and species will be negatively affected, more wildfires will occur, and thus increased risks to humanity.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.