Simulation of daily precipitation from CMIP5 in the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau

Abstract

As the earth's third pole, Qinghai-Tibet Plateau belongs to one of the most sensitive regions to climate change in the world. Based on the observed and the simulated daily precipitation from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5), we evaluated the simulation performance of daily precipitation from selected CMIP5 models from 1975 to 2005 over the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. We found that daily precipitation exhibited obvious long-range correlation characteristics using the detrended fluctuation analysis method. The scaling exponents of daily precipitation in summer and autumn are significantly larger than those in spring and winter. MIROC4H with the best performance can reproduce long-range correlation characteristic of daily precipitation series probably because of the higher resolution, which can capture small scale cloud convections. Besides there are seasonal differences in the simulation results among different regions of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, simulation effects of all climate models in summer and winter are better than those in spring and autumn. The performance of MIROC4H model works the best in spring. Overall, the scaling exponents of daily precipitation from BCC-CSM1-1-M, CMCC-CM and MIROC4H are close to the observations. CCSM4 and MIROC4H climate models could reproduce the internal dynamics characteristic of daily precipitation in autumn. But for winter, all climate models have exaggerated the scaling value in southeastern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau compared with the observed values.