In a recent review of Geoscience (IF=12.34), the influential journal Reviews of Geophysics(IF=12.34) has published a review article titled "Dryland Climate Change: Recent Progress and Challenges", written by Professor Jianping Huang (first author), Academician Wenrog-Bin Fu (corresponding author), and 19 other authors, from the School of Atmospheric Sciences at Lanzhou University. This paper reviews the latest progress and challenges in the study of arid and semi-arid climate change.
Arid and semi-arid regions account for 42% of the world's land area and support 38% of the world's population. Their ecological environment is extremely fragile and sensitive to the response of global climate change and human activities. It is of great scientific and practical significance for formulating regional sustainable development strategy and long-term adaptation countermeasures to deeply understand the evolution law and response mechanism of arid and semi-arid region climate in the past and future under the background of global change.
This paper summarizes the temporal and spatial variation characteristics of climate change in arid and semi-arid regions of the world, and discusses the main physical processes and feedback mechanisms that affect the climate change in arid and semi-arid regions, including: sand-cloud-precipitation, land-gas and sea-gas interaction, and the influence of human activities. It is pointed out that the arid and semi-arid regions in the world have the most significant warming in the past 100 years. The variation of dryness is mainly caused by the increase of greenhouse gases, but the overall effect of anthropogenic aerosols is small. The land-gas interaction determines the response intensity of regional drought in different regions. The sea-air interaction determines the global decadal dry and wet changes. Historical data and numerical simulation results show that the global arid and semi-arid regions are expanding and will expand at an accelerating rate in the future. The combined effects of climate warming, worsening drought and population growth will increase the risk of desertification in developing countries. Finally, the main research directions of arid and semi-arid climate change in the future are discussed.
Link to paper:
Huang, J., Y. Li, C. Fu, F. Chen, Q. Fu, A. Dai, M. Shinoda, Z. Ma, W. Guo, Z. Li, L. Zhang, Y. Liu, H. Yu, Y. He, Y. Xie, X. Guan, M. Ji, L. Lin, S. Wang, H. Yan, and G. Wang (2017), Dryland climate change: recent progress and challenges, Reviews of Geophysics, 55, 719-778, doi: 10.1002/2016 rg000550.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016RG000550/full
Further reading:
Founded in 1963, Reviews of Geophysics is a review journal sponsored by the American Geophysical Union (AGU). As an subscribe-only peer-reviewed journal, it publishes about 20 papers a year on solid geophysics, cryospheric sciences, atmospheric sciences, Marine sciences, and space physics.
The editor in the Review of Geophysics featured this article in an article in Eos Editors' Vox and Eos Buzz Newsletter (Eos: Earth and Space Science, an update of news and opinions related to Earth and space science) at https://eos.org/editors-vox/future-drier-as-Drylands-Continue-to-expand
