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Variability in Direct and Diffuse Solar Radiation Across China From 1958 to 2017
Author(s) -
He Yanyi,
Wang Kaicun
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1029/2019gl084570
Subject(s) - environmental science , sunshine duration , atmospheric sciences , climatology , physics , meteorology , precipitation , geology
Long‐term variability of direct and diffuse solar radiation ( R dir and R dif ) is essential for climate change study. However, R dir and R dif observations suffer from low spatiotemporal coverage and inhomogeneity. This study improved hybrid models to calculate R dir and R dif from sunshine duration and meteorological data at ~2,000 stations from 1958 to 2017 over China and demonstrated their reliability. We identified that R dir observations show a spurious steep downtrend before 1990 due to the sensitivity drift of the measuring instruments, implying an overestimation of global dimming. Long‐term trends and spatiotemporal details in R dir and R dif were also revealed. From 1958 to 1989, our results show that R dir displays a significant downtrend (−3.52 W m −2 per decade), whereas R dif shows a significant increasing trend (0.84 W m −2 per decade), especially over the North China Plain. From 1990 to 2017, R dir decreases nonsignificantly by −0.47 W m −2 per decade but R dif shows a slight decline of −0.28 W m −2 per decade.