Abstract: Potential evapotranspiration (PET) is an important part of drought monitoring and evaluation. It is very important to analyze the climatic sensitive factors of PET to reveal the mechanism of hydrological responses to climate change. However, the local sensitivity method commonly used in previous studies is not suitable for nonlinear models and it is difficult to evaluate the interaction among meteorological factors. In this study, based on the monitoring data of 163 meteorological stations in the arid and semi-arid areas of northwest China from 1964 to 2018, we use the Penman-Monteith equation and Sobol global sensitivity to analyze the climatic sensitive factors of PET in the study area and discuss the climatic causes of the PET change. We also calculate the scPDSI and analyze the evolution characteristics of drought in northwest China. The results show that the annual average PET of the study area is 1157.8 mm with substantial spatial variations. The high-value areas are located in the eastern part of Xinjiang and the western part of Inner Mongolia, and the low-value areas are located in the southern part of Qinghai Province. The year 1993 was identified as a turning point, and the PET changed from a significant downward trend to a significant upward trend, which was more apparent in the summer in that year. From 1964 to 1993, the net radiation, wind speed, and relative humidity had a relatively greater impact on PET, while in the period 1994-2018, wind speed and relative humidity had a relatively greater impact on PET. The spatio-temporal distribution of scPDSI show that the drought in northern Xinjiang, central Qinghai and Gansu is becoming less severe, while the drought severity in the southwest part of the Yellow River Basin is becoming more severe, exacerbating regional water resources shortage and threatening ecological security.