A downscaling approach for constructing high-resolution precipitation dataset over the Tibetan Plateau from ERA5 reanalysis

摘要

Current gridded precipitation datasets are hard to meet the requirements of hydrological and meteorological applications in complex-terrain areas due to their coarse spatial resolution and large uncertainties. Highresolution atmospheric simulations are capable of describing the influence of topography on precipitation but are difficult to be used to obtain long-term precipitation datasets because they are computationally expensive, while reanalysis data has a long-term coverage and can provide reasonable large-scale spatial and temporal variability of precipitation. This study presents an approach to obtain long-term high-resolution precipitation datasets over complex-terrain areas by combining the ERA5 reanalysis with short-term high-resolution atmospheric simulation. The approach consists of two main steps: first, the ERA5 precipitation is corrected by the high-resolution simulation at the coarse spatial resolution; second, the corrected data is downscaled using a convolution neural network (CNN) based model at daily scale. The proposed approach is applied to the Tibetan Plateau (TP). The downscaled results from ERA5 have a finer spatial structure than ERA5 and can reproduce the spatial patterns of precipitation revealed by the high-resolution simulation. An evaluation based on rain gauge data shows that the downscaled ERA5 has remarkably lower biases than the original ERA5 which overestimates precipitation a lot, and even higher accuracy than the high-resolution simulation data over the TP. The downscaled ERA5 preserves the temporal characteristics of ERA5 which are more consistent with the rain gauge data than that of high-resolution simulation. Since this approach is much less computing resources consuming than the high-resolution simulation, it is an effective method to obtain long-term high-resolution precipitation datasets in complex-terrain areas and is expected to have extensive applications.