Variation of sunshine hour in Shihezi region in recent 47 years

Sunshine hour is the most intuitionistic representation of radiation quantum.The change of sunshine hours affects the plant growth,animal and the anthropogenic activity.In this paper,the series of annual sunshine hours in the Shihezi region,Xinjiang,China,were developed using the sunshine hours data from 3 meteorological stations in the Shihezi region during the period of 1961-2007.The basic features of sunshine hours were analyzed using the methods of 5-year moving average,linear regression,Mann Kendall statistic,grey forecast,etal.The main results were as follows:(1)The annual sunshine hours in the area was increasing at the trend rate of 4.0h/10a.This kind of tendency appeared mainly in spring and summer and the trend rates were 5.16h /10a and 5.73h /10a,respectively.However,the tendency in winter was decreasing(2)The annual sunshine hours in Shihezi region could be classified into three stages and the years with the most and least sunshine hours occurred were in 1987 and 1997,respectively.(3)The predicted amount of sunshine hours from the established grey dynamic model indicated that there was an upward trend of the annual sunshine hours,but the trend was not significant.The sunshine hours changed abruptly in 1979,and then there was a relative less hours period,which was synchronous with temperature and precipitation trend at the same time.