The purpose of this study is to examine the trends of extreme temperature events in East Asia over the past 40 years (1979-2018) and their potential relationships with recent changes in the Northern Hemisphere cryosphere. Analyses of Sen’s slope and Mann-Kendall tests are performed for time series data of extreme temperature events extracted from NCEP-DOE reanalysis II Gaussian grid daily 2-m air temperature data. As the result, it is found that extreme high temperature events exceeding the 99th percentile show more noticeable increasing trends than the magnitude of the decreasing extreme low temperature events below the 1st percentile particularly in Mongolia, Korean Peninsula and southern China due to unexpected cold events since the late 2000s. Correlation analyses based on Kendall’s tau indicate that the reduction of spring-early summer Eurasian snow cover (data from Rutgers University Global Snow Lab.) may lead to the increasing tendency of extreme high temperature events in East Asia through snow albedo feedbacks, while paradoxically the reducing autumn-early winter Arctic sea ice (data from NSIDC) due to global warming seems to cause more frequent extreme low temperature events in recent years through the amplification of Rossby waves. Thus, it is needed to continue monitoring the feedbacks between changing Arctic cryosphere and East Asian climate systems in the warmer 21st century.

Persistent Extreme Temperature Events (PETEs) are defined in two steps; first, to define extreme temperature events, the 80th and 20th percentiles of daily maximum and minimum temperature were chosen. Then individual PETE was defined as an event which lasted three or longer consecutive extreme temperature days. In this study, we examined characteristics and changes of PETEs in Republic of Korea (ROK) using 14 weather stations with a relatively long-term period of data, 1954-2016. In ROK, PETEs lasted four-five days on average and occurred two-three times a year. PETEs lasted longer in summer than in winter and in maximum temperature than in minimum temperature. PETEs which lasted greater than seven days account for a greater proportion in summer than in winter. However, intensities of PETEs were greater in winter because of a larger temperature fluctuation. In both summer and winter, durations and intensities of persistent extreme high temperature events increased while those of persistent extreme low temperature events decreased. Changes of PETEs were closely related with both global warming and diverse large-scale climate variabilities such as AO, NAO and Nino 3.4.

The purpose of this study is to characterize long-term (1973~2012) changes in intra-seasonal temperature and extreme low temperature events in winter observed at 61 weather stations in the Republic of Korea and their associations with changes in atmospheric circulation patterns around East Asia. Maps of long-term linear trends clearly show that both temperature means and extreme events in Korea have asymmetrically changed between early winter and late winter. In early winter, changes with statistical significance are less observable, while in late winter reductions in low extreme temperature events as well as increases in temperatures, particularly after mid-1980s, are obviously observed across the study region. Comparisons of tropospheric synoptic climatic fields before and after the mid-1980s demonstrate that in early winter of recent decades, active meridional circulation from the Arctic appeared in western Eurasia and Bering sea, while in late winter, zonal circulation around East Asia associated with positive Arctic Oscillation-like patterns prevailed. These results indicate that asymmetric changes between early and late winter temperatures in Korea are associated with intra-seasonally inconsistent atmospheric circulation patterns around East Asia.