Comparing long monthly Chinese and selected European temperature series using the Vector Seasonal Shifting Mean and Covariance Autoregressive model

Highlights: • A seasonal vector model for the means, variances and correlations fitted to long monthly European and Chinese temperature series. • Temperatures in China begin to increase later than in Europe, but the increase is rapid. • Less evidence for climate change in the two western European time series than elsewhere. The purpose of this paper is to study differences in long monthly Asian and European temperature series. The longest available Asian series are those of Beijing and Shanghai, and they are compared with the ones for St Petersburg, Dublin and Uccle that have a rather different climate. The comparison is carried out in the Vector Shifting Mean and Covariance Autoregressive model that the authors have previously used to analyse 20 long European temperature series. This model gives information about mean shifts in these five temperature series as well as (error) correlations between them. The results suggest, among other things, that warming has begun later in China than in Europe, but that the change in the summer months in both Beijing and Shanghai has been quite rapid.