Climate change and the ecological responses in Xinjiang, China: Model simulations and data analyses

To reveal the regional climate changes in Xinjiang, China, precipitation and air temperature datasets from 54 meteorological stations and multiple model simulation results from CMIP5 were analyzed. The analytical results revealed an increasing trend of the air temperature in Xinjiang over the last 50 years (i.e., 1962–2011). An increasing trend of the precipitation replaced the decreasing trend since early 1980s and the climate was thus transited from warm–dry to warm–wet in early 1980s. To evaluate the effects of climate change on the ecosystems in Xinjiang, the correlation analyses between climatic parameters (i.e., precipitation and air temperature) and ecological indicators (i.e., GPP, NPP and LAI) were conducted using the 1-km annual GPP and NPP datasets from the MODIS products from 2000 to 2010 and the AVHRR BU LAI products from 1981 to 2011. The correlation analyses demonstrated that the trends of total GPP and NPP during the growing season closely followed the trend of the precipitation from 2000 to 2010. The annual mean LAI of the areas covered with vegetation was also positively correlated with the annual precipitation over the past 30 years. However, the NPP was negatively correlated with the air temperature while the GPP having no correlation with the air temperature. The results further confirm the proposition that water resource availability is the limiting factor with regard to the primary production of the ecosystem in Xinjiang.