Urbanization and air quality as major drivers of altered spatiotemporal patterns of heavy rainfall in China

Abstract

Context Land use/land cover change and other human activities contribute to the changing climate on regional and global scales, including the increasing occurrence of extreme precipitation events, but the relative importance of these anthropogenic factors, as compared to climatic factors, remains unclear.

Objectives The main goal of this study was to determine the relative contributions of human-induced and climatic factors to the altered spatiotemporal patterns of heavy rainfall in China during the past several decades.

Methods We used daily precipitation data from 659 meteorological stations in China from 1951 to 2010, climatic factors, and anthropogenic data to identify possible causes of the observed spatiotemporal patterns of heavy rainfall in China in the past several decades, and quantify the relative contributions between climatic and human-induced factors. Show more