Multi-scale climate variations in the arid Central Asia

摘要

Both of the climate changes in arid Central Asia (ACA) and arid region of Northwest China (Fig. 1) were dominated by the mid-latitude westerlies (Chen et al., 2009). Chen et al. (2008)synthesized a set of high resolution lake sediment records from ACA and demonstrated that the nature of Holocene climatic and environmental evolution in both of the arid regions of Northwest China and the whole ACA differs from that of mid-latitude monsoon dominated Asia. In fact, many studies have demonstrated the occurrence of different patterns of precipitation and/or moisture variations between westerlydominated Asia and monsoon-dominated Asia on decadal (Ma and Fu, 2006; Jiang et al., 2009; Chen et al., 2011; Huang et al., 2013) to multi-millennial time scales (Chen et al., 2010; Zhou et al., 2011). Therefore, Chen et al. (2009) have