Using the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Global Inventory, Monitoring, and Modeling Studies (GIMMS) Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) dataset (1982–2006), Yu et al. (1) found that the trend of advancing spring phenology for alpine steppe and meadow was reversed around 2000, despite the increasing air temperature over the Tibetan Plateau. This phenomenon cannot ...

Influence of aeolian activities on the distribution of microbial abundance in glacier ice Y. Chen, X.-K. Li, J. Si, G.-J. Wu, L.-D. Tian, and S.-R. Xiang School of Life Science, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, Gansu 730000, China Instituten of Modern Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lanzhou 730000, China Key Laboratory of Tibetan Environment Changes and Land Surface Processes, Institute of Ti...

College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China, Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique, IPSL, CNRS/UPMC, Paris 75005, France, Key Laboratory of Alpine Ecology and Biodiversity, Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Center for Excellence in Tibetan Earth Scicence, CAS, Beijing 100085, China, Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement, CEA CNRS...

[1] We present a record of lake-level changes from Hurleg Lake, a freshwater lake in the arid Qaidam Basin on the NE Tibetan Plateau, an area with few high-resolution paleoclimate records. The carbonate percentage and ostracode abundance show a consistent pattern with 200-year moisture oscillations during the last 1000 years. The moisture pattern in the Qaidam Basin is in opposite relation to t...

Identifying the areas at risk of ecosystem transformation and the main contributing factors to the risk is essential to assist ecological adaptation to climate change. We assessed the risk of ecosystem shifts in China using the projections of four global gridded vegetation models (GGVMs) and an aggregate metric. The results show that half of naturally vegetated land surface could be under moder...

Using new, daily cloud-free snow-cover products, this study examines snow cover dynamics and their response to climate change. The results demonstrate that the daily cloud-free snow-cover products not only posses the advantages of the AMSR-E (unaffected by weather conditions) and MODIS (relatively higher resolution) products, but are also characterized by high snow and overall classification ac...

Climate warming is likely inducing carbon loss from soils of northern ecosystems, but little evidence comes from large-scale observations. Here we used data from a repeated soil survey and remote sensing vegetation index to explore changes in soil organic carbon (SOC) stock on the Tibetan Plateau during the past two decades. Our results showed that SOC stock in the top 30 cm depth in alpine gra...

Little is known about tree height and height growth (as annual shoot elongation of the apical part of vertical stems) of coniferous trees growing at various altitudes on the Tibetan Plateau, which provides a high-elevation natural platform for assessing tree growth performance in relation to future climate change. We here investigated the variation of maximum tree height and annual height incre...

The paucity of studies on permafrost runoff generation processes, especially in mountain permafrost, constrains the understanding of permafrost hydrology and prediction of hydrological responses to permafrost degradation. This study investigated runoff generation processes, in addition to the contribution of summer thaw depth, soil temperature, soil moisture, and precipitation to streamflow in ...

[1] Previous studies have shown (1) that the Tibetan Plateau produces a significant fraction of the two components of the Equatorial Mountain Torque (EMT) in winter, (2) that these torques are in part related to the East Asian cold surges, and (3) that the cold surges affect the convection over the maritime continent. We show here that these relations are strong enough for the convection over t...