Historical and recent change in extreme climate over East Asia

Guoyu Ren (), Johnny C. L. Chan, Hisayuki Kubota, Zhongshi Zhang, Jinbao Li, Yongxiang Zhang, Yingxian Zhang, Yuda Yang, Yuyu Ren, Xiubao Sun, Yun Su, Yuhui Liu, Zhixin Hao, Xiaoying Xue and Yun Qin
Additional contact information
Guoyu Ren: China University of Geosciences (CUG)
Johnny C. L. Chan: City University of Hong Kong (CityU)
Hisayuki Kubota: Hokkaido University
Zhongshi Zhang: China University of Geosciences (CUG)
Jinbao Li: Hong Kong University (HKU)
Yongxiang Zhang: National Climate Center, China Meteorological Administration (CMA)
Yingxian Zhang: National Climate Center, China Meteorological Administration (CMA)
Yuda Yang: Fudan University
Yuyu Ren: National Climate Center, China Meteorological Administration (CMA)
Xiubao Sun: Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)
Yun Su: Beijing Normal University (BNU)
Yuhui Liu: China University of Geosciences (CUG)
Zhixin Hao: Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)
Xiaoying Xue: China University of Geosciences (CUG)
Yun Qin: China University of Geosciences (CUG)

Climatic Change, 2021, vol. 168, issue 3, No 12, 19 pages

Abstract: Abstract This is an extended editors’ commentary on the topical collection “Historical and recent change in extreme climate over East Asia”, which collects a total of 15 papers related to the change and variability of extreme climate events in East Asia over the last few hundreds years. The extreme climate events are broadly classified into three categories: temperature and extreme warmth/coldness, precipitation and floods/droughts and western North Pacific typhoons. This commentary briefly summarizes the main findings presented in each paper in this topical collection, and outlines the implications of these findings for monitoring, detecting and modeling of regional climate change and for studying climate change impacts and adaptability. It also assesses the uncertainties of these studies, as well as the remaining knowledge gaps that should be filled in the future. One solid conclusion we can draw from these studies is that there was a marked decadal to multi-decadal variability of extreme climate events in East Asia in recent history, and the extreme events as observed during the last decades of the instrumental era were still within the range of natural variability except for some of those related to temperature. More severe and enduring droughts occurred in the early 20 th century or the earlier periods of history, frequently leading to great famines in northern China. Uncertainties remain in reconstructing historical extreme climate events and analyzing the early instrumental records. Further research could focus on the improvement of methodology in proxy based reconstruction of multi-decadal variations of surface air temperature and precipitation/drought, the recovery, digitization, calibration and verification of the early instrumental records, and the mechanisms of the observed multi-decadal variability of extreme climate in the region.

Keywords: Extreme climate; Change variability; East Asia; Temperature; Flood; Drought; Typhoon; Global warming; Little Ice Age (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10584-021-03227-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:climat:v:168:y:2021:i:3:d:10.1007_s10584-021-03227-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10584

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-021-03227-5

Access Statistics for this article

Climatic Change is currently edited by M. Oppenheimer and G. Yohe

More articles in Climatic Change from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().