China coldwave duration in a warming winter: change of the leading mode

Changes of extreme climate in a warming climate may be different from place to place. How the China cold extreme events change is still an outstanding issue. From observational and modeling perspectives, this study investigates the change of the leading mode of the China coldwave duration (CWD) in a warming climate. CWD significantly reduces across China during 1957–2009. The reduction in northern China is much more than that in southern China. The CWD leading mode derived from the Empirical Orthogonal Function analysis is characterized by extreme value centers located in northern China during the cold period (1957–1979) and shifting to southern China during the warm period (1980–2009). This indicates that southern China may experience longer or shorter coldwaves in the past three decades, while those in northern China tend to vary less vigorously. The multi-model ensemble of seven state-of-the-art climate models from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) show that under the IPCC SRES A1B scenario, the maximum loading of the CWD leading mode extends to southern China at the end of twenty-first century (2080–2099). These results indicate that the primary change of the CWD leading mode in a warming climate might be the southward shift of the variation center and such position change may lead to more intense coldwave variations in southern China as observed in the past decades. Possible physical mechanisms on the variation of the CWD major mode are also investigated in this study.