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A possible recovery of the near-surface wind speed in Eastern China during winter after 2000 and the potential causes

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Abstract

A lasting decrease in the near-surface wind speed (SWS) in China has been revealed, but a following short-term strengthening in the SWS was rarely noted. In this paper, the daily mean SWS observed datasets from 328 measurement stations in Eastern China during the period 1981–2011 were used to investigate the facts and causes of the observed short-term strengthening in winter SWS in recent decades. The major results are summarized as follows: the SWS showed a significant decrease in the last 30 years, but a short-term strengthening in SWS was observed during the winter since 2000 in Eastern China. The SWS in Eastern China showed a significant decrease of − 0.11 m s−1 decade−1 from 1981 to 1999, followed by a weak increase of 0.0008 m s−1 decade−1 from 2000 to 2011. The short-term strengthening in the SWS since 2000 was mainly induced by the changes of the pressure-gradient force (PGF), which could be attributed to the changes of the sea-level pressure (SLP) in the region (51°–69.75° N, 51.75°–111.75° E). Furthermore, the changes of the PGF during the two periods of 1981–1999 and 2000–2011 were consistent with those of the SLP in the region (51°–69.75° N, 51.75°–111.75° E). The correlation coefficient between PGF and SLP was 0.32 and 0.66 during the period 1981–1999 and 2000–2011, respectively. Therefore, the effects of the changes in SLP over the region (51°–69.75° N, 51.75°–111.75° E) on changes of SWS in the Eastern China should be significant.

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Acknowledgements

The authors cordially thank the reviewers for their thorough comments and constructive suggestions, which improve the paper quality significantly. Daily meteorological data is available from the China Meteorological Data Sharing Service System, and the ERA-Interim dataset comes from the ECMWF. We thank all the dataset providers. This study was sponsored by the Chinese Natural Science Foundation (41675149, 41775087), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2016YFA0600403), and the Yunnan Province Education Department Project (2017YJS106). The paper was also supported by the Program for Key Laboratory in University of Yunnan Province, the Chinese Jiangsu Collaborative Innovation Center for Climate Change, and the Young Scholar of Distinction for Doctoral Candidate of Yunnan Province in 2016.

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  1. Key Laboratory of Atmospheric Environment and Processes in the Boundary Layer over the Low-Latitude Plateau Region, Department of Atmospheric Science, Yunnan University, Kunming, 650091, China

    Jinlin Zha & Jian Wu

  2. CAS Key Laboratory of Regional Climate-Environment for Temperate East Asia, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100029, China

    Deming Zhao

  3. School of Atmospheric Science, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210000, China

    Jianping Tang

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  1. Jinlin Zha
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Zha, J., Wu, J., Zhao, D. et al. A possible recovery of the near-surface wind speed in Eastern China during winter after 2000 and the potential causes. Theor Appl Climatol 136, 119–134 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-018-2471-z

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