Why Has the Inner Tibetan Plateau Become Wetter since the Mid-1990s?

Sun, Jianqi; Yang, Kun; Guo, Weidong; Wang, Yan; He, Jie; Lu, Hui

doi:10.1175/jcli-d-19-0471.1

Cited by 143 publications

(126 citation statements)

References 51 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

101

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…mean warming rate (Duan & Xiao, 2015). The enhanced warming has led to a series of changes in the hydrological cycles, including vegetation greening (W. Zhang et al, 2017;Zhong et al, 2019), glacier degradation, permafrost melting, runoff increasing (Sun et al, 2020) and lake expansion (Song et al, 2014;Yang et al, 2017;G. Zhang et al, 2020).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although the overall terrestrial water storage over TP is decreasing dramatically, the moisture storage in the atmosphere (quantified as total column water vapor (TCWV)) and PRE show increasing trends (Bibi et al, 2018;Sun et al, 2020;Yang et al, 2011;Zhao & Zhou, 2019). For instance, Sun et al (2020) pointed out that the PRE over the Inner TP (also called the Qiangtang Plateau) has increased since the mid-1990s. How the changes observed in the terrestrial water branch can affect the variation of atmospheric water vapor over TP through evaporation (ET) and PRE remains unclear.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The Mechanism of Increasing Summer Water Vapor Over the Tibetan Plateau

Tian

Huang

et al. 2021

JGR Atmospheres

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The Tibetan Plateau (TP) is one of the highest plateaus globally, with an average altitude of over 4,000 meters, and is known as the Asian water tower. Large amounts of terrestrial water are stored in this "Asian water towers" in glaciers, snow, lakes, and rivers. It's the source of over 12 important Asian rivers, including the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Yangtze, and Yellow Rivers, which provide essential water resources for more than two billion people (

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Mechanism of Increasing Summer Water Vapor Over the Tibetan Plateau

Tian

Huang

et al. 2021

JGR Atmospheres

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Sun et al. (2020) thought that the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation (AMO) warm phase induces a wave train of cyclonic and anticyclonic anomalies in summer over Eurasia, and the cyclonic anomalies in the west of the TP in this wave train enhanced convection and southwest winds over the Indian subcontinent. The mean AMO in the ablation season was higher during the 2010–2019 period than that during the 2000–20009 period (Figure ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Influence of Key Climate Variables on Mass Balance of Naimona'nyi Glacier on a North‐Facing Slope in the Western Himalayas

et al. 2021

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Glacier mass changes in the Himalayas impact on sustainable water resources and hazards in downstream regions. However, mass balance variation and its drivers on north‐facing slopes in the Himalayas are not well understood. This study presents the meteorological conditions, energy and mass balance characteristics for Naimona'nyi Glacier on a north‐facing slope in the western Himalayas, based on energy‐mass balance model and high‐altitude measurements from October 2010 to September 2018. The average annual mass balance measured for Naimona'nyi Glacier was −0.39 m water equivalent a−1 and point mass balances below 6,070 m above sea level were always negative. Simulations showed that melt during the ablation season dominated the annual mass balance and the interannual variability in the mass balance, and that variability in melt energy was controlled by albedo during the ablation season. The annual mass balance was found to be significantly correlated with annual precipitation during the 2011–2018 period, which is accounted for by the change in ablation‐season albedo and melt energy. The average mass balance for glaciers in the western Himalayas were higher during the 2010–2019 period than during the 2000–2009 period, partly because of higher annual precipitation during the 2010–2019 period. Over the last 20 years, the increased precipitation in the cold season was driven by a cyclonic circulation anomaly over the northwestern Indian Peninsula, which may be linked to the strengthened North Atlantic Oscillation, and the increased precipitation in the ablation season was driven by an anomaly in the cyclonic circulation over Central India, which may be related to enhanced deep convection over the Indian subcontinent and the enhanced Atlantic multidecadal oscillation.

show abstract

“…The lake area of the Tibetan Plateau and Northeast Plain and Mountain regions show significant increases primarily associated with climate change, but the Inner Mongolian Plateau reveals a decrease of 1,223.76 km 2 (Liu et al., 2013; Ma et al., 2010; J. Sun et al., 2020; Tao et al., 2015; Zhang et al., 2019; Zhou et al., 2019). Despite the presence of a small number of arid lakes in the north of China, their changes were considerably dramatic in recent years.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Century‐Scale Reconstruction of Water Storage Changes of the Largest Lake in the Inner Mongolia Plateau Using a Machine Learning Approach

Fan

Song

et al. 2021

Water Resources Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Lake Hulun is the fifth‐largest lake in China, playing a substantial role in maintaining the balance of the grassland ecosystem of the Mongolia Plateau, which is a crucial ecological barrier in North China. To better understand the changing characteristics of Lake Hulun and the driving mechanisms, it is necessary to investigate the water storage changes of Lake Hulun on extended timescales. The main objective of this study is to reconstruct the water storage time series of Lake Hulun over the past century. We employed a machine learning approach termed the extreme gradient boosting tree (XGBoost) to reconstruct the water storage changes over a one‐century timescale based on the generated bathymetry and satellite altimetry data and investigated the relationships with hydrological and climatic variables in long term. Results show that the water storage changes from 1961 to 2019 were featured by four fluctuation phases, with the highest water storage observed in 1991 (14.02 Gt) and the lowest point in 2012 (5.18 Gt). The century‐scale reconstruction result reveals that the water storage of Lake Hulun reached the highest point in the 1960s within the period of 1910–2019. The lowest stage occurred in the sub‐period of the 1930s–1940s, which was even lower than the alerted shrinkage stage in 2012. The predictive model results indicate the effective performance of the XGBoost model in reconstructing century‐scale water storage variations, with the mean absolute error of 0.68, normalized root mean square error of 0.11, Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency of 0.97, and correlation coefficient of 0.94. The annual fluctuations of water storage were mostly affected by precipitation, followed by vapor pressure, temperature, potential evapotranspiration, and wet day frequency. The dominating characteristics of different variables vary evidently with different sub‐periods. The atmospheric circulations of the Arctic Oscillation, El Nino Southern Oscillation, Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and North Atlantic Oscillation have tight associations with the water storage variations of Lake Hulun, which change with different study periods.

show abstract

Why Has the Inner Tibetan Plateau Become Wetter since the Mid-1990s?

Cited by 143 publications

References 51 publications

The Mechanism of Increasing Summer Water Vapor Over the Tibetan Plateau

The Mechanism of Increasing Summer Water Vapor Over the Tibetan Plateau

The Influence of Key Climate Variables on Mass Balance of Naimona'nyi Glacier on a North‐Facing Slope in the Western Himalayas

Century‐Scale Reconstruction of Water Storage Changes of the Largest Lake in the Inner Mongolia Plateau Using a Machine Learning Approach

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About