Comparison of products from ERA-40, NCEP-2, and CRU with station data for summer precipitation over China

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Summer precipitation products from the 45-Year European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecast (ECMWF) Reanalysis (ERA-40), and NCEP-Department of Energy (DOE) Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project (AMIP-H) Reanalysis (NCEP-2), and Climatic Research Unit (CRU) TS 2.1 dataset are compared with the corresponding observations over China in order to understand the quality and utility of the reanalysis datasets for the period 1979–2001. The results reveal that although the magnitude and location of the rainfall belts differ among the reanalysis, CRU, and station data over South and West China, the spatial distributions show good agreement over most areas of China. In comparison with the observations in most areas of China, CRU best matches the observed summer precipitation, while ERA-40 reports less precipitation and NCEP-2 reports more precipitation than the observations. With regard to the amplitude of the interannual variations, CRU is better than either of the reanalyses in representing the corresponding observations. The amplitude in NCEP-2 is stronger but that of ERA-40 is weaker than the observations in most study domains. NCEP-2 has a more obvious interannual variability than ERA-40 or CRU in most areas of East China. Through an Empirical orthogonal function (EOF) analysis, the main features of the rainfall belts produced by CRU agree better with the observations than with those produced by the reanalyses in the Yangtze-Huaihe River valley. In East of China, particularly in the Yangtze-Huaihe River valley, CRU can reveal the quasi-biennial oscillation of summer precipitation represented by the observations, but the signal of ERA-40 is comparatively weak and not very obvious, whereas that of NCEP-2 is also weak before 1990 but very strong after 1990. The results also suggest that the magnitude of the precipitation difference between ERA-40 and the observations is smaller than that between NCEP-2 and the observations, but the variations represented by NCEP-2 are more reasonable than those given by ERA-40 in most areas of East China to some extent.