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The ecological environment in arid areas is extremely fragile and especially sensitive to climate response. Continuous research on the climate and its impact mechanism in the arid zones is of great scientific significance for deeper understanding of the cause of climatic formation and better prediction of climate in arid regions. Some research progresses in recent decades both at home and abroad have been overviewed, including the distribution of arid areas, the causes of arid area climatic formation and arid area climate change. Studies have shown that AI index is an effective criterion for dividing arid areas. There are 8 major arid areas in the world; climatic formation in arid areas is the result of multiple factors; there are 6 kinds of influencing factors, such as Hadley Cell, land-air interaction and so on; the unlikely trend between dry and wet is obvious in arid areas, and some regions are facing more severe drought trends such as North Africa and China-Mongolia, while others show a trend of wetting such as the Midwest of the United States. At present, there are still some scientific problems to be solved urgently:The response of various arid regions to global warming is quite different, and climate prediction in these zones is both important and difficult; the uplift of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau has a tremendous impact on the arid area of China-Mongolia, but the models of this field are not perfect enough; there are no accepted conclusions about the causes of climatic formation in different arid regions and the causes of their different wet and dry trends. At present, it is still impossible to quantitatively distinguish the relative contributions of various influencing factors in the climate evolution of drylands and their response processes.
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