The “evaporation paradox”, reported in many regions of the world including China15, has drawn a considerable attention to explore the reason of the decreases in ETpan and/or ET0 with increases in air temperature. However, with more recent observations or longer record, an increase in ETpan and/or ET0 since 1980s or 1990s has been found in China or some regions of China2324343536. Specially, a zigzag increasing-decreasing-increasing pattern with two joint points in 1973 and 1993 has been identified in our previous study on the changes in ET0 across the Tibetan Plateau25. However, the results from most previous studies on ET0 change and driving mechanism are only based on subjective sub-regions selection. Meanwhile, the natural large atmosphere system triggering mechanisms for ET0 change have not been investigated in previous studies. Consequently, a nationwide investigation in China is naturally performed in this study to detect the real multidecadal changing patterns of ET0 and the correlation with PDO with extended data from 1961 to 2011. The temporal patterns of ET0 in eight homogenous regions identified by REOF evidently reveal that there is no monotonous decreasing trend in ET0 along with the continuously increasing temperature for the entire period (from 1961 to 2011), suggesting “paradox” phenomenon just exist in a certain stage of the multidecadal changes in ET0 in China. With one turning point, the finding that decreasing trends of ET0 reverse into increasing trends in early 1990s across EC, SE and SW regions, is in agreement with region studies on ETpan/ET0 by Liu and Zhang (2012)37 and Li et al.24. When other sub-regions are considered, coarse periodic behaviors of ET0 change with two/or three turning point seems to be reasonable as compared with total decreasing-increasing patterns of evaporation in entire China reported by Cong et al.38 and Liu et al.23. The combined effects of climatic variables to ET0 changes are revealed in all the sub-regions with the sensitive analysis, and are effective with a good agreement between the observed and calculated ET0 trends (see Table S2). Although relative humidity is the most sensitive variable (followed by net radiation, wind speed and air temperature) for all the period as well as all the sub-regions except SW and TP region, there are different dominating factors for ET0 change because the contributions of climate factors depend on the combined effect between sensitivity and trends of a variable itself9. Decline of net radiation only plays the important role for the ET0 decrease before early 1990s rather than the entire term in EC, SE and SW regions located in south China, highlighting the potential implications of “global dimming” in China over a roughly 1960–1990 period and a recovery (coined with “global brightening”) thereafter3940, which is consistent with previous studies in China1320233841, the United States3, the northeast of India42, and Greece43. There is consensus among many researchers that cloud coverage and aerosol, which are not completely independent variables with interaction in various ways44, are considered as the most likely candidates for the explanation of global dimming and brightening3945464748. Particularly strong evidence for aerosol effects on surface solar radiation with increasing air pollution in China were noted in various studies49505152. As far as the other regions with larger inter-annual variability in ET0 are concerned, variation of wind speed generally plays more decisive role in the change of ET0 from 1961 to early 1990s, in line with the evidences reported in many places and summarized by McVicar et al.11. Although the dynamic mechanism of recent slow-down in near-surface global winds is complicated, it can generally be attributed to the increases of terrestrial surface roughness5354 or large scale atmospheric circulations55565758. Focusing on the periods after 1990s, our preliminary analyses have shown that dominating factors for the increases of ET0 transited from net radiation and wind speed to relative humidity for all the sub-regions. This coincides with the recent regional study in the arid regions of northwest china by Li et al.24 and national wide study in China by Cong et al.38. A global evidence of reduction in surface atmospheric humidity revealed in this study in national scale was presented by Simmons et al.59. They inferred the recent reduction in relative humidity over land may be due to limited moisture supply from the oceans. For the purpose of simplification, the systemic errors of contribution analysis reflected by the differences between observed ET0 and complied trends may be due to the interactions among climatic factors (which were not considered here but may exist in practice) and ignorance of other factors such as aerosol and dust.