LAUSR

Abstract Central Asia (CA) is one of the most drought-prone regions in the world with complex climate regimes, it is extremely vulnerable to water scarcity. Many studies on drought in CA, as a whole, have been carried out, whereas there is a lack of studies on the drying and wetting trends of different climatic zones within CA. In this study, CA was divided into three different climatic zones based on the Koppen climate classification method, precipitation climatology, and aridity index. These were the temperate continental (Df), dry arid desert (BW), and Mediterranean continental (Ds) climatic zones. The regional drying and wetting trends during the years 1961–2015 were investigated using the monthly gridded Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI). The empirical orthogonal function (EOF) was applied to analyze spatial and temporal variation patterns. EOF mode 1 (EOF1) analysis found increasingly wet conditions throughout CA over the duration of the study, and EOF mode 2 (EOF2) analysis found a contrast between northern and southern CA: as Df became drier and BW and Ds became wetter. EOF mode 3 (EOF3) analysis found a western and eastern inverse phase distribution. The SPEI displayed a decreasing trend from 1961 to 1974 for CA as a whole, before increasing from 1975 to 2015, with a particularly significant increase over the first seven years of that period. On a regional scale, the BW and Ds zones experienced a wetting trend due to increased precipitation during 1961–2015, but the Df zone experienced a drying trend due to reduced evapotranspiration and an increasing temperature, particularly from 1961 to 1978. Thus, the spatio-temporal patterns in dryness and wetness across CA can be categorized according to climatic regions.