Climate change threatens terrestrial water storage over the Tibetan Plateau

Li, Xueying; Long, Di; Scanlon, Bridget R.; Mann, Michael; Li, Xingdong; Tian, Fuqiang; Sun, Zhangli; Wang, Guangqian

doi:10.1038/s41558-022-01443-0

Cited by 175 publications

(93 citation statements)

References 65 publications

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“…Precipitation is projected to decrease over the Amazon forest, eastern U.S., and eastern coastal regions in Australia (Figures 3m-3o), which explains the strong intensification of droughts over those regions (Figure S12 in Supporting Information S1). In high-latitude lands where future droughts are intensifying, such as the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and western U.S., the precipitation is increasing while snow is diminishing (Figures 3m-3r), implying that snow plays a more important role than precipitation in those regions (Li et al, 2022;Sharma et al, 2018). We also find that in some regions (e.g., India, China, and South America), precipitation during heat extremes are still lower than the mean values during the future period (Figure S15 in Supporting Information S1), even though precipitation is increasing there.…”

Section: Future Changes In Water Flux and Humiditymentioning

confidence: 99%

Global Increases in Lethal Compound Heat Stress: Hydrological Drought Hazards Under Climate Change

Yin

Slater

Guo

et al. 2022

Geophysical Research Letters

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Previous studies seldom consider humidity when examining heat‐related extremes, and none have explored the effects of humidity on concurrent extremes of high heat stress and low river streamflow. Here, we present the first global picture of projected changes in compound lethal heat stress (Th)‐drought hazards (CHD) across 11,637 catchments. Our observational datasets show that atmospheric conditions (e.g., energy and vapor flux) play an important role in constraining the heat extremes, and that Th (32% ± 11%) yields a higher coincidence rate of global CHD than wet‐bulb temperature (28% ± 11%), driven by lower relative humidity (RH) and thus air dryness in Th extremes. Our large model ensemble projects a 10‐fold intensification of bivariate CHD risks by 2071–2100, mainly driven by increases in heat extremes. Future declines in RH, wind, snow, and precipitation in many regions are likely to exacerbate such water and weather‐related hazards (e.g., drought and CHD).

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Section: Future Changes In Water Flux and Humiditymentioning

confidence: 99%

Global Increases in Lethal Compound Heat Stress: Hydrological Drought Hazards Under Climate Change

Yin

Slater

Guo

et al. 2022

Geophysical Research Letters

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“…Significant increases in E are observed over southern and northern Asia, northern Australia, central and northern Europe, eastern North America, and southern and central northern Africa by all the datasets, with the trends mainly ranging from 0 to 6 mm yr −1 . This increase might be caused by the warming climate and precipitation changes (Wang et al, 2022). However, we also notice the decreasing trends in the western United States (−4-0 mm yr −1 ), central South America (−8 to −4 mm yr −1 ), and Arab regions (−2-0 mm yr −1 ), probably related to the heavy land-cover changes (Ruscica et al, 2022).…”

Section: Global Trends Of Dryness and Wetnessmentioning

confidence: 59%

“…We perform the assessment of the DDWW paradigm over global land at both gridded 1 • × 1 • cell and regional scales, excluding Greenland and Antarctica. One of the global hotspots with significant changes in hydroclimatological conditions (e.g., precipitation and air temperature) (Liu et al, 2006;Zhang et al, 2017), i.e., the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP), is selected as a typical region for regional analysis because it has experienced alarming TWS losses in recent decades and shows continuing declines under future scenarios (Meng et al, 2019;Li et al, 2022). The QTP and its surroundings which are called the world's "Third Pole" play a crucial role in the freshwater availability of more than 1.4 billion people (Immerzeel et al, 2010).…”

Section: Data Preprocessingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Global evaluation of the “dry gets drier, and wet gets wetter” paradigm from a terrestrial water storage change perspective

Xiong

Chen²,

Yin³

2022

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

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Abstract. The “dry gets drier, and wet gets wetter” (DDWW) paradigm has been widely used to summarize the expected trends of the global hydrologic cycle under climate change. However, the paradigm is largely conditioned by choice of different metrics and datasets used and is still comprehensively unexplored from the perspective of terrestrial water storage anomalies (TWSAs). Considering the essential role of TWSAs in wetting and drying of the land system, here we built upon a large ensemble of TWSA datasets, including satellite-based products, global hydrological models, land surface models, and global climate models to evaluate the DDWW hypothesis during the historical (1985–2014) and future (2071–2100) periods under various scenarios with a 0.05 significance level (for trend estimates). We find that 11.01 %–40.84 % (range by various datasets) of global land confirms the DDWW paradigm, while 10.21 %–35.43 % of the area shows the opposite pattern during the historical period. In the future, the DDWW paradigm is still challenged, with the percentage supporting the pattern lower than 18 % and both the DDWW-validated and DDWW-opposed proportion increasing along with the intensification of emission scenarios. We show that the different choices of data sources can reasonably influence the test results up to a 4-fold difference. Our findings will provide insights and implications for global wetting and drying trends from the perspective of TWSA under climate change.

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“…Contrary to traditionally ground-based observations or hydrological models, the launches of Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) twin satellites in 2002 and its successor GRACE Follow-on (GRACE-FO) satellites in 2018 can provide a new methodology for retrieving terrestrial water storage anomalies (TWSAs) in real time globally by measuring temporal variations in Earth's gravity field (Ahmed et al, 2021;Tapley et al, 2004). The TWSA derived from GRACE and GRACE-FO satellites comprises all the surface and subsurface water over land, which can be used to monitor the hydrologic variations in response to extreme weather events (Li et al, 2022;Xie et al, 2019a). In this case, GRACE and GRACE-FO observations have been widely applied to assess the potential flood risks for a specific region.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Monitoring the extreme flood events in the Yangtze River basin based on GRACE and GRACE-FO satellite data

Xie

Xu²,

Yu³

et al. 2022

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

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Abstract. Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and its successor GRACE Follow-on (GRACE-FO) satellite provide terrestrial water storage anomaly (TWSA) estimates globally that can be used to monitor flood in various regions at monthly intervals. However, the coarse temporal resolution of GRACE and GRACE-FO satellite data has been limiting their applications at finer temporal scales. In this study, TWSA estimates have been reconstructed and then temporally downscaled into daily values based on three different learning-based models, namely a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) model, a long-short term memory (LSTM) model and a multiple linear regression (MLR) model. Furthermore, a new index incorporating temporally downscaled TWSA estimates combined with daily average precipitation anomalies is proposed to monitor the severe flood events at sub-monthly timescales for the Yangtze River basin (YRB), China. The results indicated that (1) the MLP model shows the best performance in reconstructing the monthly TWSA with root mean square error (RMSE) = 10.9 mm per month and Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) = 0.89 during the validation period; (2) the MLP model can be useful in temporally downscaling monthly TWSA estimates into daily values; (3) the proposed normalized daily flood potential index (NDFPI) facilitates robust and reliable characterization of severe flood events at sub-monthly timescales; (4) the flood events can be monitored by the proposed NDFPI earlier than traditional streamflow observations with respect to the YRB and its individual subbasins. All these findings can provide new opportunities for applying GRACE and GRACE-FO satellite data to investigations of sub-monthly signals and have important implications for flood hazard prevention and mitigation in the study region.

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Climate change threatens terrestrial water storage over the Tibetan Plateau

Cited by 175 publications

References 65 publications

Global Increases in Lethal Compound Heat Stress: Hydrological Drought Hazards Under Climate Change

Global Increases in Lethal Compound Heat Stress: Hydrological Drought Hazards Under Climate Change

Global evaluation of the “dry gets drier, and wet gets wetter” paradigm from a terrestrial water storage change perspective

Monitoring the extreme flood events in the Yangtze River basin based on GRACE and GRACE-FO satellite data

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