The warming over the Tibetan Plateau(TP) is very significant during last 30 years,but the thermal forcing has been weakened.The thermal weakening is attributed mainly to the enhancement of the TOA(top of atmosphere) outgoing radiation.This enhancement is opposite to the greenhouse-gas-induced weakening of the global mean TOA outgoing radiation and is also unable to be explained by the observed decrease of total cloud cover.This study presents the importance of cloud height change and the warming over the TP in modulating the TOA radiation budget and thus the thermal forcing during spring and summer.On the basis of surface observations and satellite radiation data,we found that both the TOA outgoing shortwave radiation and longwave radiation were enhanced during this period.The former enhancement is due mainly to the increase of low-level cloud cover,which has a strong reflection to shortwave radiation,especially in summer.The latter enhancement is caused mainly by the planetary warming,and it is further enhanced by the decrease of total cloud cover in spring,as clouds extinguish outgoing longwave radiation emitted from the land surface.Therefore,the radiative cooling enhancement and thus the thermal weakening over the TP is a response of the earth-atmosphere system to the unique change of cloud cover configuration and the rapid warming of the land surface.However,these trends in cloud cover and TOA outgoing radiation are not well represented in four reanalyses.
Although solar radiation is a crucial parameter in designing solar power devices and studying land surface processes,long-term and densely distributed observations of surface solar radiation are usually not available.This paper describes the development of a 50-year dataset of daily surface solar radiation at 716 China Meteorological Administration(CMA) stations.First,a physical model,without any local calibration,is applied to estimate the daily radiation at all 716 CMA routine stations.Then,an ANN-based(Artificial Neural Network) model is applied to extend radiation estimates to earlier periods at each of all 96 CMA radiation stations.The ANN-based model is trained with recent reliable radiation data and thus its estimate is more reliable than the physical model.Therefore,the ANN-based model is used to correct the physical model dynamically at a monthly scale.The correction generally improves the accuracy of the radiation dataset estimated by the physical model:the mean bias error(MBE) averaged over all the 96 radiation stations during 1994-2002 is reduced from 0.68 to 0.11 MJ m-2 and the root mean square error(RMSE) from 2.01 to 1.80 MJ m-2.The new radiation dataset shows superior performance over previous estimates by locally calibrated ngstr m-Prescott models.Based on the new radiation dataset,the annual mean daily solar radiation over China is 14.3 MJ m-2.The maximal seasonal mean daily solar radiation occurs in the Tibetan Plateau during summer with a value of 27.1 MJ m-2,whereas the minimal seasonal mean daily solar radiation occurs in the Sichuan Basin during winter with a value of 4.7 MJ m-2.
Due to climate changes, most of the alpine glaciers have retreated dramatically during the past decades. Thus it is significant to predict the alpine glacier variability in the future for a better understanding of the impact of climate changes on water resource. In this paper, we perform the numerical simulation on Urumqi Glacier No.1 in the eastern Tianshan, central Asia (hereafter Glacier No.1 for short) by considering both the mass balance and ice flow. Given the shape of the Glacier No.1, the velocity of the glacier is obtained by solving a two-dimensional nonlinear Stokes equation and simulated result is in agreement with the observation. In order to predict the variability of Glacier No.1 in the next decades, a climatic scenario is constructed with a temperature rise rate as 0.17°C/10 a and precipitation as constant during the period of 2005-2070. The simulation shows that, the glacier terminus will retreat slowly and the glacier will thin dramatically before 2040, while after year 2040, the glacier terminus retreat will accelerate. This study confirms the increasing retreat rate of alpine glaciers under global warming.
The planetary boundary layer （PBL） scheme in the regional climate model （RCM） has a significant impact on the interactions and exchanges of moisture, momentum, and energy between land, ocean, and atmosphere; however, its uncertainty will cause large systematic biases of RCM. Based on the four different PBL schemes （YSU, ACM2, Boulac, and MYJ） in Weather Research and Forecasting （WRF） model, the impacts of these schemes on the simulation of circulation and precipitation during the East Asian summer monsoon （EASM） are investigated. The simulated results of the two local turbulent kinetic energy （TKE） schemes, Boulac and MYJ, are more consistent with the observations than those in the two nonlocal closure schemes, YSU and ACM2. The former simulate more reasonable low-level southwesterly flow over East China and west pacific subtropical high （WPSH） than the latter. As to the modeling of summer monsoon precipitation, both the spatial distributions and temporal evolutions from Boulac and MTT are also better than those in YSU and ACM2 schemes. In addition, through the comparison between YSU and Boulac experiments, the differences from the results of EASM simulation are more obvious over the oceanic area. In the experiments with the nonlocal schemes YSU and ACM2, the boundary layer mixing processes are much stronger, which lead to produce more sea surface latent heat flux and enhanced convection, and finally induce the overestimated precipitation and corresponding deviation of monsoon circulation. With the further study, it is found that the absence of air-sea interaction in WRF may amplify the biases caused by PBL scheme over the ocean. Consequently, there is a reduced latent heat flux over the sea surface and even more reasonable EASM simulation, if an ocean model coupled into WRF.
