Climate changes in temperature and precipitation extremes in an alpine grassland of Central Asia

The natural ecosystem in Central Asia is sensitive and vulnerable to the arid and semiarid climate variations, especially the climate extreme events. However, the climate extreme events in this area are still unclear. Therefore, this study analyzed the climate variability in the temperature and precipitation extreme events in an alpine grassland (Bayanbuluk) of Central Asia based on the daily minimum temperature, daily maximum temperature, and daily precipitation from 1958 to 2012. Statistically significant (p < 0.01) increasing trends were found in the minimum temperature, maximum temperature at annual, and seasonal time scales except the winter maximum temperature. In the seasonal changes, the winter temperature had the largest contribution to the annual warming. Further, there appeared increasing trends for the warm nights and the warm days and decreasing trends for the cool nights and the cool days at a 99 % confidence level. These trends directly resulted in an increasing trend for the growing season length (GSL) which could have positively influence on the vegetation productivity. For the precipitation, it displayed an increasing trend for the annual precipitation although it was not significant. And the summer precipitation had the same variations as the annual precipitation which indicated that the precipitation in summer made the biggest contribution to the annual precipitation than the other three seasons. The winter precipitation had a significant increasing trend (1.49 mm/10a) and a decreasing trend was found in spring. We also found that the precipitation of the very wet days mainly contributes to the annual precipitation with the trend of 4.5 mm/10a. The maximum 1-day precipitation and the heavy precipitation days only had slight increasing trend. A sharp decreasing trend was found before the early 1980s, and then becoming increase for the above three precipitation indexes. The climate experienced a warm-wet abrupt climate change in the 1980s. Further, this tendency may be continuous into the future.