Introduction

More than a hundred papers have been published within the past 50 years about climate and atmospheric processes in the Aral Sea basin. A thorough review of them would require the publication of a separate book. Thus, in this chapter only one key aspect of climate in the Aral Sea basin is investigated: a diagnosis of regional climatic change and creeping environmental change.

The following sections are presented in general terms: natural changes in regional climate characteristics, temporal and spatial scales of change and their interactions, the rate of climate change and local anthropogenic impacts on climate. The data presented in this chapter are important for a retrospective identification of threshold levels in the development of gradually accumulating ecological changes in the Aral basin.

Basic works dedicated to the diagnosis of climate changes in the Aral Sea basin can be divided between those of the 1960s and 1970s and those of the 1980s. The steady decline of the Aral Sea level became obvious in the 1960s, thereby stimulating scientific studies. Another reason for the growth in the number of Aral-related publications was the fact that, by 1970, spatially detailed meteorological observation data in the Aral basin had already covered a period of over 30 years and were in need of scientific analysis. The development of the classification of types of the synoptic processes of Central Asia (Bugaev et al., 1957) and the classification of macrocirculation processes as applied to the Central Asian Kazakstan region (Baidal, 1964) were completed in the 1950s.