Trend of near-surface maximum wind speed in China: under a shifted East Asian monsoon scenario

Abstract

The current global climate research has traditionally focused on changes in air temperature and precipitation. As a key climate parameter, changes of winds have a very significant impact on the environment, such as soil wind erosion, air pollution diffusion, wind power energy, etc. In particular, changes of extreme wind speed (i.e., wind gusts) are poorly analyzed and deserve further investigation. In this study we assess trends in máximum wind speed (MWS) across China for 1975-2016, using observed daily wind datasets, and also analyze its relationship with the East Asian monsoon. The raw observed MWS dataset was subject to aquality control and robust homogenization protocol using the Climatol package. The results reveal a statistically significant (p<0.05) reduction of MWS of -0.024 ms -1 dec-1 at anual scale across China, with declines in Winter (-0.320 ms -1dec-1; p<0.05) and autumn (-0.090 ms -1dec-1; p<0.05), an opposite increases in summer (+0.272; p<0.05) and spring (+0.034; p>0.10). Even though MWS declines dominated across much of the country through out the year, only as mal number of stations showed statistically significant negative trends in summer (37.7 %) and spring (29.0 %). Our preliminary analyses show that the weakened East Asian monsoon, particularly in winter, positively correlates with the observed changes in MWS. However, statistical significant correlations are too few and further attribution analyses are strongly needed.