Comparisons of Time Series of Annual Mean Surface Air Temperature for China since the 1900s: Observations, Model Simulations, and Extended Reanalysis

Abstract Time series of global or regional average surface air temperature (SAT) are fundamental to climate change studies. A number of studies have developed several national and regional SAT series for China, but because of the diversity of the meteorological observational sites, the different quality control routines for processing the data, and the inconsistency of the statistical methods used, they differ in their long-term trends. This paper assesses the similarities and differences of the existing time series of the annual average SAT for China that are based upon historical meteorological observations since the 1900s. The results indicate that the China average is similar to the series for the Northern Hemisphere (NH) landmass, except that the initial warming of the NH series derived from the CRUTEM3/4 datasets, which represent global historical land surface air temperatures and near-surface air temperature anomalies over land, respectively, ends earlier (before the early 1940s) than in China’s series. A major difference among the existing China average time series is the 1940s warmth, a period when there were very few observations across the country because of World War II. The SAT anomalies for China during the 1930s to 1940s have been reduced by improved homogeneity assessment compared to previous estimates. The new improved time series is in better agreement with both the historical twentieth-century reanalysis data and the historical climate simulation of phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) models. The new time series also shows the slowdown of the warming trend during the past 18 yr (1998–2015). The best estimate of a linear trend for increases in temperature with a 95% uncertainty range is 0.121° ± 0.009°C decade–1 for 1900–2015, indicating that the improved homogeneity assessment for China leads to a slightly greater trend than that based on raw data (0.107° ± 0.009°C decade–1).