Abstract:

The paper aims to study the variation characteristics of surface temperature in the northern Tibetan plateau. Based on the land surface temperature (LST) remote sensing data from MODIS/TERRA satellite during 2002-2015 and the meteorological data for the same time, we analyzed the interannual variation of surface temperature in the northern Tibetan plateau. The results showed that: (1) the surface temperature in the northern Tibetan plateau had a slowly rising trend during 2002-2015, with the highest value of 35.3℃ in the summer of 2013 and 2015; and the lowest temperature of 5.2℃ appeared in the winter of 2011; the spatial distribution of surface temperature showed that: the high temperature area gradually expanded from the west to the east in the northern Tibetan plateau and mainly located in counties or towns where the population was relatively dense, but the low temperature areas were in the north part or sparsely populated areas with no significant variation; (2) there was a good positive correlation between the surface temperature of satellite retrieval and the observed meteorological data, while the surface temperature was negatively correlated with precipitation. In recent years, with the rapid development of towns in the eastern part of the northern Tibetan plateau, the human activities have increased significantly, which result in the increase of high-temperature areas reaching the largest in 2015.

Key words: northern Tibetan plateau, surface temperature, MODIS, remote sensing, temperature, meteorological data