Temporal–spatial diversities of long-range correlation for relative humidity over China

Long-range correlations of daily relative humidity anomaly records from 191 weather stations over China during 1951–2000 are analyzed by means of fluctuation analysis (FA) and detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA). The information about trends in the relative humidity records can be obtained by comparing the FA curve with DFA curves. The daily relative humidity fluctuations are found to be power-law correlated and their average scaling exponent is higher than that of the temperature fluctuations, indicating that the relative humidity fluctuations take different statistical behavior from other meteorological quantities and there exists a stronger persistence in the relative humidity fluctuations. Furthermore, it is also found that these power-law scaling properties vary from station to station and show both spatial and temporal diversities, which may be explained by a proposed mechanism.