GC21F-02
Change in Vegetation Growth and Its Feedback to Climate in the Tibet Plateau

Tuesday, 15 December 2015: 08:20
3003 (Moscone West)
Shilong Piao, Peking University, Beijing, China; ITP Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
Abstract:
Vegetation growth is strongly influenced by climate and climate change and can affect the climate system through a number of bio-physical processes. As a result, monitoring, understanding and predicting the response of vegetation growth to global change has been a central activity in Earth system science during the past two decades. The Tibetan Plateau (TP) has experienced a pronounced warming over recent decades. The warming rate of the TP over the period 1960-2009 was about twice the global average warming rate, yet with heterogeneous patterns. In this study, we use satellite derived NDVI data to investigate spatio-temporal change in vegetation growth over the last three decades.