Regionality of climatic change in East Asia

Regional differences in climatic change are of importance in order to establish the counter-measures for the damage by anomalous climate to agricultural production. It is not unusual for some regions to suffer floods while droughts occur in nearby regions at the same time. This paper deals mainly with the regionality of climatic change in E Asia during recent years, using the year-climate method expressed by the Köppen's system of climatic classification. Occurrence frequencies of BW, BS, Cf, Cw, Dwa, Dwb, and Dwc-type showed striking regionalities, which were obtained from the data at the 134 observatories over E Asia during the period from 1951 to 1970. The distribution of climatic types in each year shows various tendencies: Wet and cold as in 1954 and 1957 shows a pattern in which the boundary between C-type and D-type runs south and the Cfa-zone is broad, extending from middle E China to SW Japan. In contrast, in dry and warm years like 1965, the Dwa regions disappear in the N of E China and the BS region is located just north of the Cwa region, which is distributed broadly from China to Japan. Occurrence frequencies of year climate during the last 100 years were calculated for the 4 stations: Hong Kong, Manila, Shanghai and Tokyo. The results were compared with the distribution types of winter temperature and summer precipitation in China. It seems that the precipitation conditions in summer were reversed between the Philippines and China. Summarizing the results obtained, a schema of the regionality of climatic fluctuation in E and SE Asia was given in relation to the upper air streams. The position of the subtropical jet stream in winter shows a close relationship to the N limit of the Aw and Am year climate regions and in summer with the S limit of Dw region in NE China and North Korea. The Cw and Cf year climate regions in E Asia are located roughly in the regions bounded by the axes of subtropical jet streams in winter and in summer. The Dw year climate region in the E of the Tibetan Plateau reflects the altitudinal effect of the Cw climate of SE China. The N of E China has the variable BS year climate, which may related to the summer and winter jet stream conditions. Finally, the interannual change of the agricultural production index was dealt with in relation to the occurrence frequency of year climate types over E Asia during the years 1967–1970. As far as this period is concerned, the drier conditions are more effective than the wetter conditions in reducing agricultural production.