Comment on essd-2022-45

Abstract

Long-term climate data and high-quality baseline climatology surface with high resolution are essential to multiple fields including climatological, ecological, and environmental sciences. Here, we created a brand-new baseline climatology surface (ChinaClim_baseline) and developed a 1km monthly precipitation and temperatures dataset in China during 1952–2019 (ChinaClim_time-series). Thin plate spline (TPS) algorithm in each month with different model formulations by accounting for satellite-driven products and climatic research unit (CRU) datasets, was used to generate ChinaClim_baseline and monthly climate anomaly surface. Climatologically aided interpolation (CAI) was used to superimpose monthly anomaly surface with ChinaClim_baseline to generate ChinaClim_time-series. Our results showed that ChinaClim_baseline exhibited very high performance in four climatic regions with the RMSEs of precipitation and temperature elements estimation being 1.276 ~28.439 mm and 0.310 ~ 2.040 °C, respectively. The correlations among ChinaClim_baseline and WorldClim2 and CHELSA were high, but our results also captured clearly spatial differences among them. WorldClm2 and CHELSA might overestimated (or underestimated) climate events such as warming and drought in temperate continental region and high cold Tibetan plateau where weather stations were sparse. For ChinaClim_time-series, precipitation and temperature elements had average RMSEs between 7.502 mm ~ 52.307 mm, and 0.461 °C ~ 0.939 °C for all months, respectively. Compared with Peng’s climate surface and CHELSAcruts, R2 increased by ~ 7 %, RMSE and MAE decreased by ~ 17 % for precipitation; for temperature elements, R2 hardly increased, but RMSE and MAE decreased by ~50 %. Our results showed ChinaClim_baseline obviously improved the accuracy of time-series climatic elements estimation, and the satellite-driven data can greatly improve the accuracy of time-series precipitation estimation, but not the accuracy of time-series temperatures estimation. Overall, ChinaClim_baseline, an excellent baseline climatology surface, can be used for obtaining high-quality and long-term climate datasets from past to future. In the meantime, ChinaClim_time-series of 1km spatial resolution based on ChinaClim_baseline, is suitable for investigating the spatial-temporal patterns of climate changes and their impacts on eco-environmental systems in China. Here, ChinaClim_baseline is available at 10.5281/zenodo.5900743 (Gong, 2020a), ChinaClim_time-series of precipitation is available at 10.5281/zenodo.5919442 (Gong, 2020b), ChinaClim_time-series of maximum temperature is available at 10.5281/zenodo.5919448 (Gong, 2020c), ChinaClim_time-series of minimum temperature is available at 10.5281/zenodo.5919423 (Gong, 2020d) and ChinaClim_time-series of average temperature is available at 10.5281/zenodo.5919450 (Gong, 2020e).