Abstract:
Persistent precipitation and precipitation in solid forms (or near 0℃ precipitation) always result in disastrous flooding, snow and extreme freezing events, imposing severe impacts on people's lives, property and socio-economic development. Significant progresses have been made in understanding changes in total precipitation and precipitation extremes in China. However, there still exist some gaps in understanding climate changes in precipitation persistence and phase. This paper has reviewed recent progresses and major conclusions with a focus on the above two aspects. Major results are as follows. The trends of changes in precipitation persistence and phase are inconsistent over different regions under the global warming background. In China, persistent precipitation tends to be more frequent and intense over South China but becomes less frequent over North China. Long-duration precipitation in Southwest China tends to be shortened. Accordingly, persistent freezing events over South China display a decreasing trend. The reason for these changes is possible associated with atmospheric circulation anomalies induced by teleconnections low-frequency oscillations, ENSO events and as well as global warming. As mentioned above, this paper also proposes some related key issues such as understanding changes in the property of precipitation and mechanisms for precipitation persistency and phase, and their linkages to the global warming. Such kinds of study are expected to enhance our understanding of climatic changes in China's precipitation and improve our knowledge on changes in extreme weather and climate events in a warming world.