Drylands cover 41% of Earth’s surface and are the largest source of interannual variability in the global carbon sink. Drylands are projected to experience accelerated expansion over the next century, but the implications of this expansion on variability in gross primary production (GPP) remain elusive.

Solar dimming and wind stilling (slowdown) are two outstanding climate changes occurred in China over the last four decades. The wind stilling may have suppressed the dispersion of aerosols and amplified the impact of aerosol emission on solar dimming. However, there is a lack of long-term aerosol monitoring and associated study in China to confirm this hypothesis. Here, long-term meteorological data at weather stations combined with short-term aerosol data were used to assess this hypothesis.

The global climate has been experiencing significant warming at an unprecedented pace in the past century. This warming is spatially and temporally non-uniform, and one needs to understand its evolution to better evaluate its potential societal and economic impact. Here, the evolution of global land surface air temperature trend in the past century is diagnosed using the spatial–temporally multidimensional ensemble empirical mode decomposition method. We find that the noticeable warming (>0.5 K) started sporadically over the global land and accelerated until around 1980.