An assessment of precipitation and surface air temperature over China by regional climate models

Abstract

An analysis of a 20-year summer time simulation of present-day climate (1989‒2008) over China using four regional climate models coupled with different land surface models is carried out. The climatic means, interannual variability, linear trends, and extremes are examined, with focus on precipitation and near surface air temperature. The models are able to reproduce the basic features of the observed summer mean precipitation and temperature over China and the regional detail due to topographic forcing. Overall, the model performance is better for temperature than that of precipitation. The models reasonably grasp the major anomalies and standard deviations over China and the five subregions studied. The models generally reproduce the spatial pattern of high interannual variability over wet regions, and low variability over the dry regions. The models also capture well the variable temperature gradient increase to the north by latitude. Both the observed and simulated linear trend of precipitation shows a drying tendency over the Yangtze River Basin and wetting over South China. The models capture well the relatively small temperature trends in large areas of China. The models reasonably simulate the characteristics of extreme precipitation indices of heavy rain days and heavy precipitation fraction. Most of the models also performed well in capturing both the sign and magnitude of the daily maximum and minimum temperatures over China.

Keywords

regional climate model / interannual variation / trend / extremes

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (No. 2011CB952004), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 41305006, 41375075, and 91425304). The numerical calculations in this paper have been done on the IBM Blade cluster system in the High Performance Computing Center (HPCC) of Nanjing University.

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2015 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg