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Evaluation of extreme precipitation over Asia in CMIP6 models

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Abstract

Based on four reanalyses or gridded data sets (ERA5, 20CR, APHRODITE and REGEN), we provide an overview of 23 Historical and 7 HighResMIP experiments’ performance from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) (for short, 6-Hist, HighRes) in simulating seven extreme precipitation indices over Asia defined by the Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices (ETCCDI). We compare them with 28 Historical experiments in CMIP5 (5-Hist). CMIP5 and CMIP6 models are generally able to reproduce extreme precipitation’s spatial distribution and their trend patterns in comparison to the benchmark data set (APHRODITE). The overall performance of individual model is summarized by a “portrait” diagram based on four statistics for each index. We divide all 58 models into three groups (A, the top 20%; B, the median 60% and C group, the last 20%) according to MR rankings (the comprehensive ranking measure). Based on the “portrait” diagram and MR rankings, models that perform relatively well for all seven extreme precipitation indices include HadCM3, HadGEM2-AO, HadGEM2-CC and HadGEM2-ES from 5-Hist, EC-Earth3, EC-Earth3-Veg from 6-Hist and ECMWF-IFS-HR, ECMWF-IFS-LR, ECMWF-IFS-MR from HighRes. The simulated performance of CMIP6 is polarized, for the top four and the last five ranking models are both from CMIP6. Compared with the counterpart models in CMIP6 and CMIP5, the improvement of PCC (pattern correlation coefficient) is more obvious. Furthermore, the dry biases of CMIP6 (both 6-Hist and HighRes) in Southern China and India and the wet biases of CMIP6 in Tibet are reduced compared to CMIP5. This may benefit from the improvement that CMIP6 models can capture the characteristics of meridional moisture flux convergence, and improve the overestimation or underestimation of meridional and zonal specific humidity eddies compared to CMIP5.

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Data availability

The daily mean gridded precipitation from APHRODITE were acquired from their Web site at https://www.chikyu.ac.jp/precip/english/products.html. The ERA5 reanalyses data were acquired from the website of the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts:https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/dataset/reanalysis-era5-single-levels?tab=form. The REGEN data are obtained from this Web site https://researchdata.ands.org.au/rainfall-estimates-gridded-station-v10/. The 20th Century Reanalysis Project can be available from https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.20thC_ReanV2c.html. The JRA55 data can be available from ftp://ds.data.jma.go.jp. The CMIP5 data are obtained from https://esgf-node.llnl.gov/projects/cmip5/. The CMIP6 data are obtained from https://esgf-node.llnl.gov/projects/cmip6/.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by National Key R&D Program of China (2016YFA0602703), the Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research Program (2019QZKK0103), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant no. 2020M672942), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities from Sun Yat-Sen University (Grant no. 19lgpy31). We express sincere gratitude to the reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions. We also wish to thank all data providers and the modeling groups for producing and making their model outputs available.

Funding

The National Key R&D Program of China (2016YFA0602703), the Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research Program (2019QZKK0103), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant no. 2020M672942), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities from Sun Yat-Sen University (Grant no. 19lgpy31).

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  1. School of Atmospheric Sciences, Sun Yat-Sen University, Zhuhai, 519082, China

    Tianyun Dong & Wenjie Dong

  2. Key Laboratory of Tropical Atmosphere-Ocean System, Ministry of Education, Zhuhai, 519082, China

    Tianyun Dong & Wenjie Dong

  3. Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory, Zhuhai, 519082, China

    Tianyun Dong & Wenjie Dong

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Dong, T., Dong, W. Evaluation of extreme precipitation over Asia in CMIP6 models. Clim Dyn 57, 1751–1769 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-021-05773-1

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