Discrepancies in the Vertical Profiles of Long-term Temperature Trends among Reanalyses

Agreement in the vertical profiles of the temperature trends from radiosonde observation (HadAT) and four kinds of reanalysis dataset (ER A40, ER A-I, NCEP-DOE, and 20CR) are examined for the period of 1979-2000. There are noticeable spread among reanalysis and observation datasets in the temperature trend depending on region and vertical level. East Asia shows large discrepancy among datasets, while Europe shows relatively good agreement. Generally, biases in temperature trends are larger in the upper troposphere (above 300 hPa) than in the lower and middle troposphere. Comprehensive comparison of the long-term temperature trends among reanalyses is made for horizontal distributions with height, latitude-pressure cross-sectional distributions, zonally-averaged meridional distributions with height, and area-averaged vertical profiles in both DJF and JJA. Consequently, we find that the degree of agreement among reanalyses significantly varies with vertical level, region, and season. The highest discrepancy is found over southern high-latitudes and in the upper troposphere over southern tropics. In the tropical upper troposphere above 200 hPa, observation (HadAT) shows cooling trend increases with height, but three reanalyses show warming trends except NCEP-DOE reanalysis in which cooling trend is overestimated. In conclusion, discrepancies in the vertical profiles of long-term temperature trends among four kinds of reanalysis datasets are quite large, and then a scrupulous approach should be needed when reanalysis dataset is used for climate change study.