Representativeness of Four Precipitation Observational Networks of China

Four precipitation observational networks with varied station densities are maintained in China. They are: the Global Climate Observation System (GCOS) Surface Network (GSN), the national Reference Climate Network (RCN), the national Basic Meteorological Network (BMN), and the national Ordinary Meteorolog- ical Network (OMN). The GSN, RCN, BMN, and the merged network of RCN and BMN (R&B) have been widely used in climatology and climate change studies. In this paper, the impact of the usage of di?erent networks on the precipitation climatology of China is evaluated by using the merged dataset of All Station Network (ASN) as a benchmark. The results show that all networks can capture the main features of the country average precipitation and its changing trends. The differences of average annual precipitation of the various networks from that of the ASN are less than 50 mm (≤ 10%). All networks can successfully detect the rising trend of the average annual precipitation during 19612009, with the R&B exhibiting the best representativeness (only 2.90% relative difference) and the GSN the poorest (39.77%). As to the change trends of country average monthly precipitation, the networks can be ranked in descending order as R&B (1.27%), RCN (2.35%), BMN (4.17%), and GSN (7.46%), and larger relative differences appear from August to November. The networks produce quite consistent spatial patterns of annual precipitation change trends, and all show an increasing trend of precipitation in Northwest and Southeast China, and a decreasing trend in North China, Northeast China, and parts of central China. However, the representativeness of the BMN and R&B are better in annual and seasonal precipitation trends, in spite of the fact that they are still far from satisfactory. The relative differences of trends in some months and regions even reach more than 50%. The results also show that the representativeness of the RCN for country average precipitation is higher than that of the BMN because the RCN has a more homogeneous distribution of stations.