Annual Precipitation Fluctuation and Spatial Differentiation Characteristics of the Horqin Region

Precipitation is the main water source for vegetation survival in arid and semi-arid areas. However, previous studies always focus on the effects of precipitation in different time scales, but ignore the effects of precipitation in different spatial scales. To further study the effects of precipitation fluctuation in different spatial scales, we used the wavelet analysis method to analyze its temporal and spatial change based on data from eighteen meteorological stations during 1961–2015 in Horqin region. Results showed that: (1) from the overall tendency of precipitation changes, the precipitation inter-annual variations in Horqin region had the tendency of gradually decreasing from the southeast (District IV) to the northwest; (2) the precipitation anomalies of District I–IV between 1960 and 1980 were small and approximate to the normal value; (3) in the time scale of 23–32 years, the cyclical fluctuations were very significant and the annual precipitation underwent two cyclical fluctuations from a period of low precipitation to a period of high precipitation; and (4) as results of analyzing the spatial wavelet variance of sub-region, the main cycle of precipitation in District I, District II and District III was between 10 and 11 years, while the main cycle of precipitation in District IV was 25 years. The main conclusions include the following. (1) This region tended to be arid, and the precipitation gradually decreased from the southeast (District IV) to northwest (District I). (2) The influence of spatial differentiation characteristics on precipitation fluctuation in this region was cyclical fluctuation, which gradually decreased from the southeast to the northwest. The length of the cyclical change period gradually shortened. In the first main cycle, whose annual precipitation changes were most significant, the changing characteristic was District IV and District I decreased from 25 years to 10 years. (3) Predicated from the cyclical changing law that the annual precipitation decreases from high to low, the Horqin region will remain in a period of low precipitation between 2016 and 2020.