Journal
JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH-ATMOSPHERES
Volume 125, Issue 19, Pages -Publisher
AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION
DOI: 10.1029/2019JD031914
Keywords
snow depth; snow-covered days; Tibetan Plateau; trends; change
Categories
Funding
- National Key Research and Development Program of China [2018YFA0606004]
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [91737307, 91637103, 41605062, 91337217, 42075165]
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The Tibetan Plateau has experienced substantial warming during the last few decades. As a result, the cryosphere of the Tibetan Plateau, including the snow cover, has shown significant changes. We characterized the changes in snow over the Tibetan Plateau using several snow-related indices, including snow depth and snow-covered days based on the MERRA-2 and JRA-55 reanalysis data set and passive microwave (MW) satellite observations. The analyses were performed over different time periods-including the last 38, 30, 20, and 10 snow seasons-from 1980 to 2018. The results show that the significant trends in snow depth and snow-covered days are dependent on both the season and region and vary with the data set and snow-related index used. There was a clear decrease in the annual maximum consecutive snow-covered days (CSCDMax), and this was characterized by a later begin time and an earlier end time for both MERRA-2 and JRA-55, but only a later begin time for MW during the time period 1980-2018. The changes in CSCDMax were generally dominated by changes in the begin time, which were mainly caused by the increase in the average 2-m air temperature for November-December. The relatively weak trends in the end time were a result of the combined impact of warmer temperatures and more precipitation in March-April. The CSCDMax averaged over the Tibetan Plateau showed decreasing trends in all studied time periods for JRA-55 and MW and in the last 38 and 10 snow seasons for MERRA-2 during the time period 1980-2018.
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