In recent years,the agricultural-pastoral transitional zone in the northwest China has experienced the significant warming trend,leading to serious impacts on the ecosystems and livelihood of farmers and herdsmen. It is vital to understand the climatic variability and the persistence of the region to prepare for and mitigate future disastrous events. Monthly meteorological data from 1950s to the year 2014 were used to analyze climatic characteristics at different time scales by regression analysis,Mann-Kendall test and rescaled range analysis. The results show that the average annual and seasonal temperatures in the study area presented the strong increasing trend with the largest increase in winter temperature and the smallest increase in summer temperature; the annual precipitation in the study area presented the decreasing trend,but the seasonal precipitation in autumn was increasing; the decreasing trend in the annual precipitation was mainly due to the reduced precipitation in summer; the average annual temperature in the study area displayed the obvious changes during the 1990s,but the changes in the precipitation occurred in the 1960s,1990s,and around the year 2010. The average temperatures in the study area showed the strong increasing persistence while the annual and seasonal precipitations showed the slightly decreasing anti-persistence,indicating that the future climate of the study area would become warmer and wetter in the short term.