Growing interests in simulating changes in hydrological processes at global and regional scales correspond to increasing floods and draughts at the global scale induced by climate changes, which would have a significant impact on social and economic systems, food security and the survival and development of humans. By connecting sunshine percentage data of twelve national standard meteorological stations evenly distributed in the northern and southern regions of Xinjiang from 1955 to 2012 with the existing climatic regionalization of the place, the rate of linear tendency, the Mann-Kendall test and Morlet wavelet analysis were used to illustrate the change trends and detect abrupt changes of meteorological elements respectively to study the climate changes in northern and southern Xinjiang in the last 60 years. The results showed that a trend that the sunshine percentage decreased obviously existed in these regions, with the sunshine percentage being higher in the north. Variations of sunshine percentage in those years were consistent in northern and southern regions of Xinjiang, with most of these stations observing a down trend. From the point of view of each decade, the sunshine percentage showed an "increase-increase-decrease-decrease-decrease" pattern in the north, but the south showed an "increase-increase-decrease-decrease-increase" pattern. Abrupt changes in sunshine percentage showed no obvious abrupt change points, which might be due to the urbanizing development and increasing cloud coverage. Wind speed or maximum temperature and mean temperature were positively correlated with the sunshine percentage, while precipitation and relative humidity were passively correlated with it. There was not a clear relationship between the minimum and sunshine percentage. The results of the Morlet wavelet analysis showed that in the northern Xinjiang, the presence of sunshine percentage changes exhibited a circle of 5 a and 25 a. In the south the presence of sunshine percentage showed a clear period of 5 a and 10 a around the periodic variation.