Climatic Growing Season Evolution in Temperate China: a CORDEX analysis

Abstract

Abstract The evolution of the vegetation growing season in the context of global warming is an important topic. This study investigates the evolution of climatic growing season of different land cover types in temperate China with 5°C as the limiting temperature in the past (1971–2010) and future (under RCP4.5 scenario). Results indicate that from 1971 to 2010, the length of climatic growing season in most regions of temperate China increased slightly, with earlier start dates of growing season as a feature. In RCP4.5, larger changes in the start of the climatic growing season can be found in East China and the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau; whereas area with predominant, changes in the end of growing season entail the central, southern and eastern parts of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and the mountains regions of Xinjiang, the number of days of change is more than 30 days. Woodland and grassland have similar mean growing season variation while grassland has a significantly larger scale of growing season lengthening due to its 30 + day delay in the end of the growing season.