Climate Change Over the Past 50 Years in the Yanqi Basin

There has been evidence of warming and significant change in precipitation in northwest China, implying climate change in the vast arid/semiarid regions. This study showed that there was an increasing trend in air temperature over the period of 1960-2014 in the Yanqi Basin, and the warming was most pronounced since the mid-1990s. The warming rate varied over space and between seasons, with a greater rate in autumn (0.30-0.40 degrees C/10a) and winter (0.29-0.45 degrees C/10a) than in spring (0.13-0.26 degrees C/10a) and summer (0.17-0.24 degrees C/10a). There was also large interannual to decadal variability in precipitation in the Yanqi Basin and runoff in the Kaidu River. Precipitation showed an overall small increasing trend over the period of 1960-2014. The lower reaches of the Kaidu River experienced a significant increase in runoff since the mid-1990s, which might be primarily a result of warming that enhanced melting of snow and glacier in the surrounding mountains.