Abstract: Based on the observed data of evaporation from 1970-2000 of 10 meteorological stations, in Shanghai proper and its suburbs, by means of some statistical methods, including cumulative anomaly percentage, 5-year running average, t-test for paired samples etc., the spacial and temporal features of evaporation in Shanghai are discussed in this paper. The results obtained are as follows: (1) The climate in Shanghai has significantly changed into the warm type since the year of 1987. In this study, the variation of evaporation in Shanghai suburbs basically accords with the climate change in recent 30 years. Compared with the 1970s, the annual evaporation of the 1980s has generally decreased in Shanghai suburbs. During the 1990s, the annual evaporation of suburbs has increased along with the rising of the air temperature. The trend of cumulative evaporation anomaly percentage for suburbs resembles the figure of sine wave basically during the studied period from 1970 to 2000. (2) On the contrary, the annual evaporation trend for the Shanghai proper is obviously opposite with the trend of suburbs in studied period. Compared with the 1970s, the annual evaporation of the 1980s has increased in Shanghai proper. Although the regional air temperature and precipitation in Shanghai had both increased in the 1990s, the evaporation of Shanghai proper had reversely showed a trend of greatly reducing. The trend for time series of cumulative evaporation anomaly percentage for proper from 1970 to 2000 resembles the figure of cosine wave, which deviates with the trend of suburbs. (3) Evaporation differences between Shanghai proper and suburbs are obvious with 2-tailed sig. value being less than 0.01. The regional distribution of evaporation nearly correlates with differences of regional ground states. Baoshan and Chongmin are located in the estuary of Yangtze River in northeast Shanghai, so the evaporation of the two districts is more than that of the other suburbs due to the high wind speed. It is worth discussing that the results in this paper are based on the observed data, but the processes and mechanisms of evaporation differences between Shanghai proper and suburbs should be further researched though a series of experiments. Otherwise, because the evaporation data for a relative long period are different to obtain from different type of observation instruments (Eφ20 and E601), it is difficult to analyze the long variable cycle of evaporation.