An Effective Approach for Improving the Real-Time Prediction of Summer Rainfall over China

This paper has two purposes. One is to evaluate the ability of an atmospheric general circulation model (IAP9L-AGCM) to predict summer rainfall over China one season in advance. The other is to propose a new approach to improve the predictions made by the model. First, a set of hindcast experiments for summer climate over China during 1982–2010 are performed from the perspective of real-time prediction with the IAP9L-AGCM model and the IAP ENSO prediction system. Then a new approach that effectively combines the hind-cast with its correction is proposed to further improve the model’s predictive ability. A systematic evaluation reveals that the model’s real-time predictions for 41 stations across China show significant improvement using this new approach, especially in the lower reaches between the Yellow River and Yangtze River valleys.