Paper Reviewed
Shen, X., Liu, B., Li, G., Wu, Z., Jin, Y., Yu, P. and Zhou, D. 2014. Spatiotemporal change of diurnal temperature range and its relationship with sunshine duration and precipitation in China. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 119: 13,163-13,179.

In a study of diurnal temperature range (DTR), defined as daily Tmax minus daily Tmin, that was conducted for the entirety of China based on data collected from 479 weather stations for the period 1962 to 2011, Shen et al. (2014) found that the country-wide DTR declined at a mean rate of 0.157°C/decade, which phenomenon they attributed to the fact that, in most parts of the world, daily minimum temperatures increased at a faster rate than daily maximum temperatures since the 1950s, citing the similar findings of Karl et al. (1993), Horton (1995), Easterling et al. (1997) and Zhou et al. (2009), while additionally noting that "DTR decreased significantly in China over the past several decades," citing Karl et al. (1991, 1993), Kukla and Karl (1993), Dai et al. (1997, 1999), Liu et al. (2004), Ye et al. (2010), Zhou and Ren (2011), Wang and Dickinson (2013), Xia (2013) and Wang et al. (2014).

And why are these findings so important? They are important because cold temperature extremes are responsible for far more deaths around the world than are warm temperature extremes, as may be seen by perusing the materials we have posted under the heading of Health Effects (Temperature - Hot vs. Cold Weather) in our Subject Index. And this finding suggests that if the Earth were to continue to warm as it did over much of the 20^th century, this phenomenon should lead to a significant reduction in temperature-related human mortality."

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