Climatic variation of tropical cyclones affecting China during the past 50 years

Trends of the tropical cyclones (TCs) influence on China and its four subregions,namely the South China (SC),East China (EC),Northeast China (NEC),and China's inland area (CI),are detected by applying quantile regression to the CMA-STI tropical cyclone best track and related severe wind and precipitation observation datasets.The results indicate that in the past 50 years,the number of TCs affecting China and its four subregions has remained steady,except that the frequency in extremely active years has decreased not only in China as a whole,but also in NEC.In addition,TC activity is found to have weakened over the northwest South China Sea,Guangdong,and Shandong Peninsula.However,the most important changes in seasonality are found in the first quartiles of the number of days of TCs affecting CI.While the extreme values of sustained winds all have decreasing trends,the extreme values of wind gusts are completely different not only among different orders of extreme values,but also among different subregions.However,the trends of extreme TC rainfall,namely the maximum storm precipitation and the maximum 1-h precipitation,are not significant.