The production of tea (Camellia sinensis (L.) Kuntze), the world’s second most consumed beverage, is susceptible to extreme weather events. However, our understanding about the impacts of extreme temperatures and climate change on tea yields remains fairly limited. Here we quantify the historical and predict future fluctuations in tea yield caused by extreme temperatures in China, the largest tea producing country. We found that both heat and cold extremes were associated with significantly reduced tea yields. In the present climate, dominating cold extremes influence more than half of China’s tea production, with a maximum of 56.3% reduced annual production. In the near future, we predict positive net impacts of climate change on tea yield in all study regions at both the 1.5 °C and 2.0 °C global warming levels. Climate warming may diminish the negative impacts of cold extremes to 14%, especially at the current most affected northern tea growing regions (>28° N). However, new areas of yield reduction by intensified heat extremes will emerge, up to 14%–26% yield losses estimated at the Yangtze River (∼30° N) and southern China (<∼25° N) regions. Although the Paris Agreement targets limiting global warming to 1.5 °C, we expect up to 11%–24% heat-induced yield loss in Chongqing, Hunan, Anhui, and Zhejiang. Increasing heat extremes pose the most challenging changes for tea production in China. Therefore, addressing the regional difference of extreme temperature shifts is urgent for adapting tea production to climate change.
Wind stilling has been observed in many regions across the Northern Hemisphere; however, the related mechanisms are not well understood. Analyses of the wind speed variations in South Korea during 1993-2015 in this study reveal that the annual-mean surface wind speeds at rural stations have increased by up to 0.41 m s −1 decade −1 , while those at urban stations have decreased by up to −0.63 m s −1 decade −1 . The local wind speed variations are found to be negatively correlated with the population density at the corresponding observation sites. Gustiness analyses show the increase in local surface roughness due to urbanization can explain the observed negative wind speed trends at urban stations as the urbanization effect overwhelms the positive wind speed trend due to climate change. The observed negative wind speed trend in urban areas are not found in the regional climate model simulations in the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment-East Asia (CORDEX-EA) as these models do not take into account the impact of urbanization on wind variations during the period. This study suggests that urbanization can play an important role in the recent wind stilling in rapidly developing regions such as South Korea. Our results suggest that future climate projections in CORDEX-EA may overestimate wind speeds in urban areas, and that future regional climate projections need to consider the effects of urbanization for a more accurate projection of wind speeds.
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