Abstract
The Tibetan Plateau (TP) is an important component of the global climate system, while the characteristics of its climate are poorly represented in most regional climate models at coarse resolutions. In this study, a 20-year (2000–2019) dynamical downscaling simulation at the gray-zone resolution (9 km) using the WRF model driven by the ERA5 reanalysis is conducted over the TP. Based on comparisons against in-situ observations and the Integrated Multi-satellite Retrievals for GPM (IMERG) version 6 satellite precipitation product, the assessment of basic climate variables, such as near-surface air temperature (T2m) and precipitation, is performed to evaluate the model’s performance and understand its added value better. Results show that both WRF and ERA5 can successfully reproduce the spatial patterns of annual mean and seasonal mean surface air temperature. However, significant cold and wet biases are found especially over the southeastern TP in ERA5, which are greatly improved in WRF with reduced RMSEs. Not only the climatological characteristics, but also the inter-annual variability and seasonal variation of T2m and precipitation are well captured by WRF which reduces the cold and wet biases especially in winter and summer compared to ERA5, respectively. Besides, at daily scale, the overestimation of precipitation in WRF and ERA5 is mainly caused by the overestimated precipitation frequency when precipitation intensity changed slightly. Furthermore, WRF outperforms ERA5 in capturing the diurnal variation of precipitation with more realistic peak time in all sub-regions over the TP. Further investigation into the mechanism of model bias reveals that less simulated snow cover fraction plays a crucial role in increasing the surface net energy by affecting surface albedo over the southeastern TP in WRF, leading to higher T2m. In addition, less water vapor transport from the southern boundary of TP leads to reduced wet bias in WRF, indicating that the added value in dynamical downscaling at gray-zone resolution is obtained by representing water vapor transport more realistically.
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Availability of data and material
The station observations used in this work are available at: http://data.cma.cn/en. The ERA5 dataset used in this work is available at: https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/datasets/reanalysis-datasets/era5. The IMERG dataset used in this work is available at: https://gpm1.gesdisc.eosdis.nasa.gov/data/GPM_L3/GPM_3IMERGHH.06. The IMS dataset used in this work is available at: https://nsidc.org/data/g02156.
Code availability
The analysis code is available on request from the corresponding author.
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Acknowledgements
The research is supported by the Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research Program (STEP, Grant No.2019QZKK0206), National Key Research and Development Program of China (2018YFA0606003) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41875124), the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education (CH2019-8377), and the Jiangsu Collaborative Innovation Center for Climate Change.
Funding
This work was supported by the Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research Program (STEP, Grant No.2019QZKK0206), National Key Research and Development Program of China (2018YFA0606003) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41875124) as well as the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education (CH2019-8377).
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by PZ, MM, and JT. MS, TO, and JT helped perform the analysis with constructive discussions. The first draft of the manuscript was written by PZ and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Zhou, P., Shao, M., Ma, M. et al. WRF gray-zone dynamical downscaling over the Tibetan Plateau during 1999–2019: model performance and added value. Clim Dyn 61, 1371–1390 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-022-06631-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-022-06631-4