Warming Pattern of Surface and Air Temperature over China during the Last Five Decades and Its Representation in the Atmospheric Reanalyses Abstract

Although global warming has been attributed to increases in atmospheric greenhouses gases, the mechanisms underlying spatiotemporal patterns of warming trends remain under debate. However, mechanism for regional climate change is still unclear to us, likely due to that land-atmosphere interactions play a comparatively important role. Herein, we analyzed surface and air warming observations recorded at 1,977 stations in China from 1960 to 2003. Our Results show that the warming trends of Ts and Ta in South China and North China Plain were obviously lower than that in north of China, especially for Ta-max which show significant cooling trend from 1960 to 2003. The main reason caused these patterns were the decreases of Rs in South China and North China Plain, which results in cooling effect. Most of the reanalysis data can’t reproduce the pattern of trend in Rs, resulting in the significant bias of the warming pattern. ERA-Interim and JRA-55 have assimilated Ta observed at fixed time. However, ERA-Interim has important error in reproduce mean value and trend of Tsmax and Tamax.