Evaluation of historical snow cover over the Tibetan Plateau in CMIP6
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Graphical Abstract
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Abstract
Snow cover variations and related climate processes over the Tibetan Plateau (TP) have garnered significant attention as an essential indicator of climate change. However, due to the complex terrain of the TP, most numerical models exhibit notable uncertainty in simulating snow conditions in this area. This study evaluates historical snow simulations and related climate anomalies over the TP in numerical models from the World Climate Research Programme Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6). We compare the CMIP6 model simulations with two observation-based snow cover products across different seasons and temporal scales. Our results indicate that the multi-model ensemble (MME) mean of CMIP6 models has reasonably captured the spatial distribution of annual and seasonal climatological mean TP snow, albeit with weaker magnitudes compared to observations. The CMIP6 MME performs better over the western TP than the eastern regions, showing a higher reproducibility of the long-term warming trends and snow decreasing trends, partly due to the atmospheric circulation anomalies related to global warming. Additionally, some CMIP6 models successfully capture the interannual variability of TP snow cover and its relationship with associated climate factors. Our work emphasizes the importance of CMIP6 model selection and pays attention to data reliability in interpreting the CMIP6 model results across different TP regions in studying the snow cover variation and climate effects using numerical models.
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