Reliability of reanalyses products in simulating precipitation and temperature characteristics over India

Various reanalyses have been utilized in numerous climate related researches around the globe, however, there exists considerable biasedness in these products, especially in precipitation and temperature data. The ability of these reanalysis products to simulate the precipitation and temperature patterns is observed to be satisfactory at global scale, while it differs significantly at regional scale, especially over regions of high spatio-temporal heterogeneity such as India. Therefore, it is essential to evaluate the applicability and robustness of reanalyses in climate related research. The annual and seasonal variability in spatio-temporal patterns and trends of precipitation and temperature data, with respect to the IMD gridded data over 34 yrs, are evaluated for six global reanalyses namely, NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis (NCEP R1), NCEP-DOE AMIP-2 Reanalysis (NCEP R2), Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (CFSR), ECMWF Interim Reanalysis (ERA-Interim), Modern Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Application Land only model (MERRA-Land) and JMA 55-year Reanalysis (JRA-55). The ability of the reanalyses was tested based on several factors such as statistical and categorical indices, spells and trends, for annual and seasonal daily values. Several regional and seasonal differences were observed, particularly over high rainfall regions such as Western Ghats and northeastern India. MERRA-Land is found to give the best results for precipitation over India, which is attributed to the updated forcing data using gauge-based precipitation observations. Similarly, ERA-Interim and JRA-55 exhibit better performance for temperature than other datasets. All reanalyses failed to correctly reproduce the trends in IMD data, for both precipitation and temperature. These observations will provide a better perception on the reliability and applicability of reanalyses for climate and hydrological studies over India.