Contributions of Local and Remote Atmospheric Moisture Fluxes to East China Precipitation Estimated from CRA-40 Reanalysis

摘要

China Meteorological Administration(CMA) recently released its 40-yr(1979–2018) global Chinese reanalysis(CRA-40) dataset. To assess performance of the CRA-40 data in quantifying the regional water cycle, contributions of local and remote atmospheric moisture fluxes to precipitation in East China derived from CRA-40 are compared with those derived from the ECMWF reanalysis version 5(ERA-5). Observed precipitation and evaporation data are also used for validation. As for mean precipitation, CRA-40 matches the observation better in winter and spring than in summer, with a larger wet bias(1.41 mm day^(-1)) in summer than that in ERA-5(0.97 mm day^(-1)), particularly over South China. The conservation of atmospheric water vapor over East China measured by CRA-40 is comparable to that of ERA-5. Both reanalyses show a dominant role of the remote moisture transport in the East China precipitation.In comparison, the annual precipitation induced by the moisture influx from the west of the study domain in CRA-40 is 80 mm less than that in ERA-5. The recycling ratio of annual mean precipitation in CRA-40 is approximately21.1%, slightly larger than that in ERA-5(20.1%). The maximum difference of each hydrological component between the two datasets appears in the summer horizontal moisture influx(3.57 ×10^(7) kg s^(-1);ERA-5 is larger) and winter runoff(1.84 ×10^(7) kg s^(-1);CRA-40 is larger). CRA-40 shows better performance than ERA-5 in capturing the interannual variability of precipitation over East China, as evinced by a higher correlation coefficient with the observation(0.77 versus 0.33). The trend of summer precipitation since 2011 is better reproduced in CRA-40. Both reanalyses show prominent contribution of the southern moisture influx to the interannual variation of precipitation. This study demonstrates the reliability of CRA-40 in representing the hydrological cycle over East China and provides a useful reference for future application of CRA-40 in water cycle studies.