Spatiotemporal scaling of surface air temperature fields in China

The characteristics of spatiotemporal variability of surface air temperature anomaly fields in China are computed from the data of instrumental observations carried out from 1907 to 2000. The fields are represented by their empirical orthogonal function expansion. The temporal variations of the coefficients of this expansion are considered at the scale range from one month to five years. It turned out that both the orthogonal function structure and the type of the temporal variability of expansion coefficients in China differ from those in Northern Eurasia. Investigating the current climate warming in China, it is enough to consider the first two empirical orthogonal functions of temperature fields only. The characteristic time of the existence of temperature anomalies described by these functions is almost the same as that of the temperature anomalies in Northern Eurasia described by the first empirical orthogonal function of the respective fields.