Abstract. With the aggravation of the global climate change, the
shortage of water resources in China is becoming more and more serious.
Using reasonable methods to study changes in precipitation is very important
for planning and management of water resources. Based on the time series of
precipitation in Beijing from 1951 to 2015, the multi-scale features of
precipitation are analyzed by the Extreme-point Symmetric Mode Decomposition
(ESMD) method to forecast the precipitation shift. The results show that the
precipitation series have periodic changes of 2.6, 4.3, 14
and 21.7 years, and the variance contribution rate of each modal component
shows that the inter-annual variation dominates the precipitation in
Beijing. It is predicted that precipitation in Beijing will continue to
decrease in the near future.