Understanding the Biases in Daily Extreme Precipitation Climatology in CMIP6 Models

  • Jiaqi Chen
  • , Bo Liu
  • , Cristian Martinez-Villalobos
  • , Bin Wang
  • , Zhongshi Zhang

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Future projections in extreme precipitation depend heavily on climate models. Therefore, assessing their fidelity in reproducing the extreme rainfall characteristics in historical simulation is critical. We evaluated CMIP6 models' performance in reproducing the climatology of daily extremes, focusing on the global land monsoon (GLM) domain that feeds two-thirds of the world's population. Compared with ERA5, models demonstrate a significant wet bias in GLM domain for the annual maximum daily precipitation (14.14%) and the extreme tail of daily precipitation distributions (32.53%), more than twice the global average. Decomposition of biases reveals that dynamic processes, particularly vertical velocity, primarily drive these biases. Using the quasi-geostrophic (Formula presented.) equation, we determined that the component associated with large-scale adiabatic disturbances ((Formula presented.)) mainly drives vertical velocity biases, with diabatic heating term amplifying them. Furthermore, a significant correlation between (Formula presented.) biases and baroclinicity biases in midlatitude suggests that baroclinicity biases are a key contributor to the vertical velocity biases.

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere2024GL114507
JournalGeophysical Research Letters
Volume52
Issue number12
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 28 2025
Externally publishedYes

Funding

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Number 42125502, 42375037, 42005118, 42205008), the Data Observatory Foundation ANID Technology Center (Number DO21000), the Proyecto ANID Fondecyt Iniciación 11250471, and the National Key Scientific and Technological Infrastructure Project Earth System Numerical Simulation Facility (EarthLab, No. 2023‐EL‐PT‐000465).

Keywords

  • CMIP6 climate models
  • baroclinicity
  • dynamic and thermodynamic decomposition
  • extreme precipitation
  • global land monsoon domain
  • model bias

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