Climatic and associated atmospheric water cycle changes over the Xinjiang, China

Abstract: Arid-region water resource management is hindered by severely inadequate river discharge monitoring, with effective observations of hydrological processes particularly lacking in narrow river channels. To overcome this bottleneck, this study proposes an integrated multi-model remote sensing retrieval framework and systematically evaluates the applicability of Manning’s equation, the At-Many-Stations Hydraulic Geometry (AHG) model, and the AHG’s relaxed form (AMHG) in typical arid-region rivers on the northern slope of the Kunlun Mountains. Runoff was estimated by integrating multi-source remote sensing imagery (Sentinel-2, Landsat-8, and Gaofen-1) on the Google Earth Engine platform and combining it with genetic algorithms for parameter optimization. The results indicate that Manning’s equation performed the best overall (RMSE = 21.78 m3/s, NSE = 0.94) and was highly robust to river width extraction errors, with Manning’s roughness coefficient having a significantly greater impact than the hydraulic slope. The AHG model can construct long-term discharge series based on limited measured data but is sensitive to the accuracy of river width extraction. Although the AMHG model improved the retrieval performance, its effectiveness was constrained by systematic biases in proxy variables. The study also found that the AHG exponent b in the rivers of this region exhibits high stability (coefficient of variation < 0.09), providing a theoretical basis for constructing a sustainable discharge monitoring system. The integrated method developed in this study offers a reliable technical pathway for dynamic hydrological monitoring and quantitative water resource management in data-scarce arid regions.

TL;DR: Wang et al. as mentioned in this paper characterized the linear trends and interannual signals of terrestrial water storage (TWS) and meteorological variables including precipitation (P) and evapotranspiration (ET) over the arid Northwestern China (NWC).

TL;DR: In this paper, an updated procedure for calculating reference and crop evapotranspiration from meteorological data and crop coefficients is presented, based on the FAO Penman-Monteith method.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors present an overview of the climate system and its dynamics, including observed climate variability and change, the carbon cycle, atmospheric chemistry and greenhouse gases, and their direct and indirect effects.