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Rainfall is a complexity dynamics process. In this paper, our objective is to find the evidence of self-organized criticality (SOC) for rain datasets in China by employing the theory and method of SOC. For this reason, we analyzed the long-term rain records of five meteorological stations in Henan, a central province of China. Three concepts, that is, rain duration, drought duration, accumulated rain amount, are proposed to characterize these rain events processes. We investigate their dynamics property by using scale invariant and found that the long-term rain processes in central China indeed exhibit the feature of self-organized criticality. The proposed theory and method may be suitable to analyze other datasets from different climate zones in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impacts of climate change on future drought properties in various regions across China are accessed using multiple statistical approaches, based on 20 downscaled global climate models provided by NASA (NEX-GDDP) under Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) 4.5 and RCP8.5 emission scenarios. Results show that temperature plays a crucial role on the variability of drought conditions in China by comparing the discrepancies between Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI). Unobvious variability of drought extent is projected for SPI, while the drought extent for SPEI is remarkable. Based on SPEI, a considerable aggravation in spatial extent and severity of future drought events are found in the majority of regions, particularly in northwest and northeast China, except for winter over northeast region. The drought extent increases more significantly after late 2070s under RCP8.5 scenario, and the differences of drought extent are not significant between RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 scenarios in the early and mid-twenty-first century. More than 85% of the regions show a decreasing trend for SPEI in spring, summer, and autumn, suggesting drought tendency in most of China, and drought frequency also increases significantly in north and northwest China except for winter. The dramatic aggravation of drought attribution is mainly projected to the increases in potential evapotranspiration (PET) in northwestern and northern regions of China, whereas in northwestern region, the exacerbating drought conditions are expected to the attribution of deficiencies of rainfall. At national scale, PET plays a more dominant role to the future severe and widespread droughts across China in the context of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]