Supplementary Information for
Global semi-arid climate change over last 60 years
Jianping Huang*, Mingxia Ji, Yongkun Xie, Shanshan Wang,
Yongli He, Jinjiang Ran
Key Laboratory for Semi-Arid Climate Change of the Ministry of Education,
College of Atmospheric Sciences, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, Gansu, China
_______________________________
Corresponding author:
Jianping Huang
College of Atmospheric Sciences, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, Gansu, China
E-mail: hjp@lzu.edu.cn
1. Long-term trend of wind speed
Fig. S1 show the distribution of the linear trends of the terrestrial wind speed by using the
GLDAS data. The wind speed decreases during the last 61 years in Northern Hemisphere, such as
East Asia, Central Asia, and northern Africa regions, while increasing trends are apparent in part
of South America and other small areas. Fig. S2 shows the regionally averaged wind speed from
GLDAS in global land surface, Northern Hemisphere and mid-latitude regions in Northern
Hemisphere respectively.
Fig. S1 The distribution of the linear trends of the terrestrial wind speed from GLDAS for
1948-2008.
Fig. S2 The variations of the regionally averaged wind speed over global land surface (black
curve), Northern Hemisphere (blue curve), and mid-latitude regions in Northern Hemisphere (red
curve) from 1948 to 2008.
2. Comparison of precipitation trends in semi-arid regions
Fig. S3 shows the distributions of the linear trends of precipitation in semi-arid regions by
using CRU (Harris et al. 2014), GPCC (Schneider et al. 2011), and UDel (Legates and Willmott
1990) datasets. It can be found that both datasets have a good agreement with each other. In
addition, the variations of the regional averaged trends of precipitation in typical semiarid regions
are shown in Fig. S4-S6, and there are only small difference of the precipitation trends between
three datasets.
Fig. S3 The distributions of the linear trends in the precipitation in semi-arid regions globally by
using CRU, GPCC, and UDel datasets from 1948 to 2008.
Fig. S4 The variations of the regionally averaged precipitation in the semi-arid regions over East
Asia, Central Asia, and North America by using CRU (left column), GPCC (middle column), and
UDel (right column) datasets from 1948 to 2008. The blue curve indicates the newly formed
semi-arid regions, and the black curve denotes the old semi-arid regions.
Fig. S5 Same as Fig. S4 but for southern Africa, central/west Australia, and east Australia
semi-arid regions.
Fig. S6 Same as Fig. S4 but for northern Africa semi-arid regions.
References
Harris I, Jones P, Osborn T, Lister D (2014) Updated high-resolution grids of monthly climatic
observations-the CRU TS3. 10 Dataset. Int J Climatol 34(3): 623-642
Legates DR, Willmott CJ (1990) Mean seasonal and spatial variability in gauge-corrected, global
precipitation. Int J Climatol 10(2): 111-127
Schneider U, Becker A, Finger P, Meyer-Christoffer A, Rudolf B, Ziese M (2011) GPCC Full
Data Reanalysis Version 6.0 at 0.5o: Monthly Land-Surface Precipitation from Rain-Gauges
built on GTS-based and Historic Data. DOI: 10.5676/DWD_GPCC/FD_M_V6_050