Temporal-spatial variability of modern climate in the Altai Mountains during 1970-2015

RESEARCH ARTICLE Temporal-spatial variability of modern climate in the Altai Mountains during 1970-2015 Yinbo Li1, Dongliang ZhangID2,3*, Mariia AndreevaID4, Yaoming Li2,3, Lianlian Fan2,3, Min Tang5 1 College of Resource and Environmental Science, Xinjiang University, Urumqi, China, 2 State Key Laboratory of Desert and Oasis Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, Urumqi, China, 3 Chinese Academy of Sciences, Research Center for Ecology and Environment of Central Asia, Urumqi, China, 4 St. Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg, Russia, 5 Altai Branch of the Altai National Forestry Administration of China, Aletai, China * zhdl@ms.xjb.ac.cn Abstract Located in the intermediate zone between the taiga forests in Siberian Plain and the deserts in Central Asia, the Altai Mountains are of scientific concern about Holocene climate change in the past decades. However, researches about modern climate changes are relatively scarce in the Altai Mountains. In this study, temporal- spatial changes of air temperature and precipitation were investigated systematically in the Altai Mountains based on fifteen meteo- rological records over the period of 1970–2015. The Altai Mountains experienced a rapid warming trend with a rate of 0.41˚C/decade and an insignificantly wetting trend at a rate of 4.82 mm/decade during 1970–2015. The magnitude of temperature trend was negatively correlated with elevation in cold season (spring and winter), whereas that was positively cor-

related with elevation in warm season (summer and autumn). The cyclonic anomalies to the northwest and an anticyclonic anomalies to the southeast blocked the southward cold air and then provided the favorable condition for an increasing precipitation via the southwes- ternly wind in the Altai Mountains. Introduction The AR5 of IPCC proposes a significantly warming trend during the past century on earth [1]. There is growing evidence that the rate of warming is amplified with elevation, such that high- elevation environments experience more rapid changes in temperature than environments at low elevation [2–5]. The Asian Central Arid Zone (ACAZ) is rightly situated in the core of Eurasia. Due to few water vapor supplies from the near oceans (i.e., the North Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean), glaciers and snow in high-elevation regions of ACAZ (i.e., the Tianshan Mountains and the Altai Mountains) become the most important solid water reservoir and support the oasis agriculture developments and urban operations. However, they are in a state of rapid melting heavily affected by the climate warming, leading to the water resources at risk [6–10]. It means that the temporal-spatial temperature and pre- cipitation variability in ACAZ should be paid more attention on. The changes of modern tem- perature and precipitation in the Tianshan Mountains, the largest mountain system in ACAZ, PLOS ONE PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0230196 March 17, 2020 1 / 15 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS

Citation: Li Y, Zhang D, Andreeva M, Li Y, Fan L, Tang M (2020) Temporal-spatial variability of modern climate in the Altai Mountains during 1970-2015. PLoS ONE 15(3): e0230196. https:// doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0230196 Editor: Bao Yang, Chinese Academy of Sciences, CHINA Received: August 12, 2019 Accepted: February 24, 2020 Published: March 17, 2020 Peer Review History: PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process; therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. The editorial history of this article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0230196 Copyright: © 2020 Li et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: The data from Russia were obtained from the website (http://meteo.ru/ english/data/). The data from China were downloaded from the website (http://data.cma.cn/).