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Spatial interpolation of daily precipitation in China: 1951–2005

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Abstract

Climate research relies heavily on good quality instrumental data; for modeling efforts gridded data are needed. So far, relatively little effort has been made to create gridded climate data for China. This is especially true for high-resolution daily data. This work, focuses on identifying an accurate method to produce gridded daily precipitation in China based on the observed data at 753 stations for the period 1951–2005. Five interpolation methods, including ordinary nearest neighbor, local polynomial, radial basis function, inverse distance weighting, and ordinary kriging, have been used and compared. Cross-validation shows that the ordinary kriging based on seasonal semi-variograms gives the best performance, closely followed by the inverse distance weighting with a power of 2. Finally the ordinary kriging is chosen to interpolate the station data to a 18 km× 18 km grid system covering the whole country. Precipitation for each 0.5° × 0.5° latitude-longitude block is then obtained by averaging the values at the grid nodes within the block. Owing to the higher station density in the eastern part of the country, the interpolation errors are much smaller than those in the west (west of 100°E). Excluding 145 stations in the western region, the daily, monthly, and annual relative mean absolute errors of the interpolation for the remaining 608 stations are 74%, 29%, and 16%, respectively. The interpolated daily precipitation has been made available on the internet for the scientific community.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth Sciences, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Deliang Chen & Tinghai Ou

  2. School of Geography, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China

    Tinghai Ou

  3. Department of Earth Sciences, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

    Lebing Gong & Chong-Yu Xu

  4. Department of Geosciences, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Chong-Yu Xu

  5. Laboratory for Climate Studies/National Climate Center, China Meteorological Administration, Beijing, 100029, China

    Weijing Li  (李维京)

  6. School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea

    Chang-Hoi Ho

  7. School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Weihong Qian  (钱维宏)

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  1. Deliang Chen
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  2. Tinghai Ou
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  5. Weijing Li  (李维京)
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  6. Chang-Hoi Ho
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  7. Weihong Qian  (钱维宏)
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Correspondence to Deliang Chen.

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Chen, D., Ou, T., Gong, L. et al. Spatial interpolation of daily precipitation in China: 1951–2005. Adv. Atmos. Sci. 27, 1221–1232 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00376-010-9151-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00376-010-9151-y

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