An intercomparison of summertime （JJA）subtropical geopotential heights from the ERA-40 and NCEP/NCAR reanalysis is specifically conducted over East Eurasia and the western North Pacific. The NCEP/NCAR is obviously lower than the ERA-40 in the mid-to-lower troposphere in most regions of East Eurasia before the mid-1970s, but becomes higher than the ERA-40 after the mid-1970s and thus demonstrates stronger increased trends during the period of 1958-2001. Both reanalyses are lower than the observations in most regions of China. The NCEP/NCAR especially shows tremendously systematic lower values before the mid-1960s and displays abrupt changes before the 1970s. Several indices of the western North Pacific subtropical high （WNPSH）, calculated from both reanalyzed summer geopotential heights, also reveal that the variation trend of the NCEP/NCAR is stronger than that of the ERA-40 in the mid-to-lower troposphere from 1958 to 2001. Through singular value decomposition （SVD） analysis, the summer geopotential heights at 500 hPa from the ERA-40 are better than the NCEP/NCAR counterparts at interacting with the precipitation over the East Asian monsoon region. The results indicate that the NCEP/NCAR in the mid-and-lower troposphere may overestimate interdecadal changes and should be used cautiously to study the relationship between the WNPSH and precipitation ove ther East Asia Monsoon region before the mid-1970s.
In this study, the ability of dynamical downscaling for reduction of artificial climate trends in global reanalysis is tested in China. Dynamical downscaling is performed using a 60-km horizontal resolution Regional Integrated Environmental Model System （RIEMS） forced by the NCEP-Department of Energy （DOE） reanalysis II （NCEP-2）. The results show that this regional climate model （RCM） can not only produce dynamically consis- tent fine scale fields of atmosphere and land surface in the regional domain, but it also has the ability to minimize artificial climate trends existing in the global reanalysis to a certain extent. As compared to the observed 2-meter temperature anomaly averaged across China, our model can simulate the observed inter-annual variation and variability as well as reduce artificial climate trends in the reanalysis by approximately 0.10℃ decade-1 from 1980 to 2007. The RIEMS can effectively reduce artificial trends in global reanalysis for areas in western China, especially for regions with high altitude mountains and deserts, as well as introduce some new spurious changes in other local regions. The model simulations overesti- mated observed winter trends for most areas in eastern China with the exception of the Tibetan Plateau, and it greatly overestimated observed summer trends in the Si- chuan Basin located in southwest China. This implies that the dynamical downscaling of RCM for long-term trends has certain seasonal and regional dependencies due to imperfect physical processes and parameterizations.
