Recent Increase of Spring Precipitation over the Three-River Headwaters Region—Water Budget Analysis Based on Global Reanalysis (ERA5) and ET-Tagging Extended Regional Climate Modeling

Abstract

Abstract Precipitation change is critical for the Three-River Headwaters (TRH) region, which serves downstream communities in East Asia. The spring (March–May) precipitation over the TRH region shows an increasing trend from 1979 to 2018, as revealed by a Chinese gridded precipitation product (CN05.1). However, the physical processes responsible for this precipitation change are still unclear. This study investigated the characteristics of spring precipitation and the water budget over the TRH region using the ERA5 global reanalysis and the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) Model. The WRF version employed in this study includes online calculations of the atmospheric water budget and an evapotranspiration (ET) tagging procedure to trace evapotranspired water in the atmosphere. Both ERA5 and WRF reproduce the spring precipitation increase. Moreover, WRFD02 (with a 3-km domain) reduces the wet bias by around 60% and 77% compared to WRFD01 (9 km) and ERA5 (30 km). Both ERA5 and WRF demonstrate that the increase of spring precipitation is dominated by moisture convergence, especially the atmospheric water fluxes from the southern boundary. The enhanced moisture inflow is sustained by enhanced mass flux while the enhanced moisture outflow is sustained by increased moisture. The ET-tagging results further demonstrate the weakened precipitation recycling process because of the significant increase of precipitation produced by external moisture. Compared to ERA5, the reduced wet bias with WRF is attributed to a better spatial resolution of orographic barrier effects, which reduce the southerly water fluxes. The results highlight the potential of regional climate downscaling to better represent the atmospheric water budget in complex terrain.