Abstract
Climate models participated in the High Resolution Model Intercomparison Project (HighResMIP) of Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 6 (CMIP6) are evaluated to reveal the impact of enhanced resolution in simulating the climatological distribution of precipitation over China. The multi-model mean (MME) of five models with 30–50 km horizontal resolution in the atmosphere (MME-50) had a better performance in reproducing the observed spatial patterns of precipitation over Northwest China and Southwest China than the MME of their lower-resolution (70–140 km) models (MME-100). Such an improvement is mainly attributed to the topographical rainfall reproduced by the higher-resolution models, which have the superiority of reproducing the local vertical circulation over the complex terrain. The MME-50 also improves the skill score of the 850-hPa southwesterly of the Indian-Burma trough relative to the MME-100, which may contribute to better simulation skill of precipitation over Southwest China. The MME-50 (0.92) has a close skill score to the MME-100 (0.91) in the simulation of East Asian summer monsoon, which explains why the MME-50 cannot improve the simulation skill of the precipitation over Southeast China and Northern China. The skill score of the precipitation over the Tibetan Plateau (TP) simulated by the MME-50 is even lower than the MME-100, revealing that simulating the climate over the high plateau is still a challenge for the high-resolution models.
Highlights
Reproducing the distribution of the precipitation over China is still a challenge for global climate models because of the complex terrain and the East Asian summer monsoon (EASM) system
The motivation of this study is to investigate the role of horizontal resolution in simulating the precipitation over China and the EASM through comparing five highresolution models which participated in Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 6 (CMIP6) HighResMIP and their low-resolution versions
Our analysis shows that improvements merely the horizontal resolution could simulations of precipitation in the Tibetan Plateau (TP) [3]
Summary
Reproducing the distribution of the precipitation over China is still a challenge for global climate models because of the complex terrain and the East Asian summer monsoon (EASM) system. In CMIP5, the horizontal resolution of most models increased to 150 km in the atmosphere and 1◦ in the ocean [7]. Global high-resolution climate models in CMIP6 HighResMIP at 25–50 km outperform the CMIP5 models in simulating regional-scale precipitation distribution over Europe [11]. The motivation of this study is to investigate the role of horizontal resolution in simulating the precipitation over China and the EASM through comparing five highresolution models which participated in CMIP6 HighResMIP and their low-resolution versions. The method used to calculate the skill score was from Chen et al [24], and wa verify model performance of the precipitation and EASM by previous studies [9,10,25]. In calculating the skill of wind field, the zonal wind and meridional wind are converte into a one-dimensional array
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