Abstract: The spatial and temporal characteristics and dynamic mechanism of arid and semi-arid climate change have been reviewed in this paper. Recently, most of the research on the arid and semi-arid regions’ climate change mainly focused on the specific regions. However, there are less systematic studies for the relationship of climate change on the different global arid and semi-arid regions. The understanding of the mechanism of land surface process model development is another shortage on the climate change studies because the experiments are limited to work on it. Finally, the questions in arid and semi-arid climate change studies and future research direction are proposed.

Key words: arid climate, semi-arid climate, climate change