Arctic Oscillation influence on daily temperature variance in winter over China

The relationship between the Arctic Oscillation (AO) and daily temperature variance of 150 Chinese stations are investigated in the present study for wintertime (1November through 31 March) in the period of 1954–2001. Results show that the temperature variance significantly decreases during the high AO years, and increases in low AO cases. A key factor connecting them is the Siberian High, particularly the high-frequency fluctuations of the High. Within the seasonal time scale, the frequency of low-temperature extremes (daily temperature anomaly below 2σ, σ is the standard deviation of daily temperature for a given winter and a given station) displays an odd relation to the variance: a larger (smaller) variance is found to be associated with smaller (greater) frequency of low-temperature events. That is due to the non-normal distribution of the temperatures, and also influenced by the phases of AO. During the last 50 years or so, AO experiences a significant increasing trend, meanwhile the variance of daily sea level pressure (SLP) in the central region of Siberian High has decreased at a rate of 10.7%/10 a. These result in a significant weakening of the daily temperature variance in China with a trend of 4.1%/10 a, and a significant increase in the intra-seasonal low-temperature extremes at a rate of 0.16d/10 a.