Evaluation on monthly sea surface wind speed of four reanalysis data sets over the China seas after 1988

Abstract

This study investigates the long-term changes of monthly sea surface wind speeds over the China seas from 1988 to 2015. The 10-meter wind speeds products from four major global reanalysis datasets with high resolution are used: Cross-Calibrated Multi-Platform data set (CCMP), NCEP climate forecast system reanalysis data set (CFSR), ERA-interim reanalysis data set (ERA-int) and Japanese 55-year reanalysis data set (JRA55). The monthly sea surface wind speeds of four major reanalysis data sets have been investigated through comparisons with the long-term and homogeneous observation wind speeds data recorded at ten stations. The results reveal that (1) the wind speeds bias of CCMP, CFSR, ERA-int and JRA55 are 0.91 m/s, 1.22 m/s, 0.62 m/s and 0.22 m/s, respectively. The wind speeds RMSE of CCMP, CFSR, ERA-int and JRA55 are 1.38 m/s, 1.59 m/s, 1.01 m/s and 0.96 m/s, respectively; (2) JRA55 and ERA-int provides a realistic representation of monthly wind speeds, while CCMP and CFSR tend to overestimate observed wind speeds. And all the four data sets tend to underestimate observed wind speeds in Bohai Sea and Yellow Sea; (3) Comparing the annual wind speeds trends between observation and the four data sets at ten stations for 1988–1997, 1988–2007 and 1988–2015, the result show that ERA-int is superior to represent homogeneity monthly wind speeds over the China seaes.