Abstract:

Global warming has been a hot issue during recent decades, while the global warming hiatus since 1998 was detected as documented by many papers, meanwhile the Tibetan Plateau (TP) experiencing a rapid warming process. Based on previous studies, this paper mainly reviews the TP climate change under the global warming in four aspects: temperature, snow cover, precipitation and atmospheric apparent heat source, and points out that the accelerated warming over the TP results in the retreat of snow cover accompanied by the increase of precipitation. Though the TP heat source has been declined in recent decades whether based on observation or reanalysis datasets, it shows large uncertainties.

Key words: global warming, Tibetan Plateau (TP), climate change, acceleration