With daily precipitation records at 586 stations in China for 1960-2004, this study investigates the spatio-temporal variation of the number of extreme wet days (NEWD) for each season in China and its relationship with SST anomalies and associated atmospheric circulation anomaly patterns, in which a threshold of extreme precipitation for a season and a station is defined as the value of the 90th percentile when the precipitation records for wet days during the season are ranked in an increasing order. Results show that there are significant increases of the NEWD along the Yangtze River valley during winter and summer, in North China during winter, in South China during spring, in Northeast China during winter and spring, and in Northwest China throughout the seasons, while there is a remarkable decrease in North China during summer. Besides the linear trend, the NEWD also exhibits considerable interannual and interdecadal variabilities. After eliminating the linear trend, the NEWD anomalies show distinct seasonal patterns. The NEWD anomalies are characterized by a "dipole" mode with opposite phases between northern and southern China in spring and autumn, a "tri-pole" mode with opposite phases between Yangtze River valley and southern and northern China in summer, and a "monopole" mode with the same phase over most of China in winter. The relationship of the NEWD anomalies in China with the SST anomalies in Indian and Pacific Oceans is found to be mainly dependent on the ENSO, and associated atmospheric circulation anomaly patterns for the ENSO's impact on the NEWD in China are identified.
With the ERA40 reanalysis daily data for 1958-2001, the global atmospheric seasonal-mean diabatic heating and transient heating are computed by using the residual diagnosis of the thermodynamic equation. The three-dimensional structures for the two types of heating are described and compared. It is demonstrated that the diabatic heating is basically characterized by strong and deep convective heating in the tropics, shallow heating in the midlatitudes and deep cooling in the subtropics and high-latitudes. The tropical diabatic heating always shifts towards the summer hemisphere, but the midlatitude heating and high-latitude cooling tend to be strong in the winter hemisphere. On the other hand, the transient heating due to transient eddy transfer is characterized by a meridional dipole pattern with cooling in the subtropics and heating in the mid- and high-latitudes, as well as by a vertical dipole pattern in the midlatitudes with cooling at lower levels and heating in the mid- and higher-levels, which gives rise to a sloped structure in the transient heating oriented from the lower levels in the high latitudes and higher levels in the midlatitudes. The transient heating is closely related to a storm track along which the transient eddy activity is much stronger in the winter hemisphere than in the summer hemisphere. In Northern Hemisphere, the transient heating locates in the western oceanic basin, while it is zonally-oriented in Southern Hemisphere, for which the transient heating and cooling are far separated over South Pacific during the cold season. The transient heating tends to cancel the diabatic heating over most of the globe. However, it dominates the mid-tropospheric heating in the midlatitudes. Therefore, the atmospheric transient processes act to help the atmosphere gain more heat in the high-latitudes and in the mid-troposphere of midlatitudes, reallocating the atmospheric heat obtained from the diabatic heating.
