In the context of global warming, the frequency and intensity of extreme weather and climate events have been increasing. Characterized by scarce water resources and fragile ecosystems, Northwest China has experienced a climate shift since the 1980s. In this study, spatial and temporal patterns of changes in the indices of climate extremes, based on daily maximum and minimum temperature and precipitation at 172 meteorological stations in Northwest China, were analyzed for the period 1960–2020. A total of 26 indices divided into two categories, 16 extreme temperature indices and 10 extreme precipitation indices, were used. Analysis of these indices revealed a general warming trend in the region, which consistent with global warming. The regional occurrence of summer days, tropical nights, growing season length, warm nights, warm days, and warm spell duration index increased by 0.22, 0.14, 0.29, 0.73, 0.46, and 0.11 days/decade, respectively. Over the same period, the occurrence of frost days, icing days, cool nights, cool days, and cold spell duration index decreased by −0.38, −0.21, −0.93, −0.44, and −0.13 days/decade, respectively. The decreasing trends in cold extremes were greater than the increasing trends in warm extremes. Additionally, many regions have experienced increasing trends in several precipitation indices. The annual total wet-day precipitation increased by 5.3 mm/decade. Increasing trends were also evident in simple daily intensity index, heavy precipitation days, very heavy precipitation days, very wet days, and extremely wet days. Consecutive dry days decreased by −1.5 days/decade, while no significant change was observed in consecutive wet days. In contrast to the remarkable spatial consistency of temperature extremes, precipitation extremes exhibited large and expected spatial variability. Most precipitation indices showed increasing trends in the western region of Northwest China and decreasing trends in the eastern part of Northwest China. These results indicate a transition from cold–dry to warm–wet in Northwestern China. Our findings suggest that Northwest China is experiencing more extreme climate events, which could consequently impact hydrological processes, ecological processes, and human health. These observations increase our understanding of the interactions between climate change and regional climate variability, which is conducive to improving disaster prevention.

With the development of vehicle sensors, unmanned driving has become a research hotspot. Positioning is also considered to be one of the most challenging directions in this field. Aiming at the poor positioning accuracy of vehicles under GNSS denied environments, a lane-level positioning method based on inertial system and vector map information fusion is proposed. A dead reckoning model based on optical fiber IMU and odometer is established, and its positioning error is regarded as a priori information. Furthermore, a map matching model based on HMM is built up. Three validation experiments are carried out and experimental results show that the positioning error can be reduced to less than 30 cm when driving for about 7 min, which proves the effectiveness of the proposed method. Our work may provide a reference for the further improvement of positioning for unmanned driving under GNSS denied environments.