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Twentieth-Century Surface Air Temperature over China and the Globe Simulated by
Coupled Climate Models
TIANJUN ZHOU AND RUCONG YU
State Key Laboratory of Numerical Modeling for Atmospheric Sciences and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics, Institute of Atmospheric
Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
ABSTRACT
This paper examines variations of the surface air temperature (SAT) over China and the globe in the
twentieth century simulated by 19 coupled climate models driven by historical natural and anthropogenic
forcings. Most models perform well in simulating both the global and the Northern Hemispheric mean SAT
evolutions of the twentieth century. The inclusion of natural forcings improves the simulation, in particular
for the first half of the century. The reproducibility of the SAT averaged over China is lower than that of
the global and hemispheric averages, but it is still acceptable. The contribution of natural forcings to the
SAT over China in the first half of the century is not as robust as that to the global and hemispheric
averages. No model could successfully produce the reconstructed warming over China in the 1920s. The
prescribed natural and anthropogenic forcings in the coupled climate models mainly produce the warming
trends and the decadal- to interdecadal-scale SAT variations with poor performances at shorter time scales.
The prominent warming trend in the last half of the century over China and its acceleration in recent
decades are weakly simulated. There are discrepancies between the simulated and observed regional
features of the SAT trend over China. Few models could produce the summertime cooling over the middle
part of eastern China (2736N), while two models acceptably produce the meridional gradients of the
wintertime warming trends, with north China experiencing larger warming. Limitations of the current
state-of-the-art coupled climate models in simulating spatial patterns of the twentieth-century SAT over
China cast a shadow upon their capability toward projecting credible geographical distributions of future
climate change through Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenario simulations.
JCLI3952
5844 JOURNAL OF CLIMATE VOLUME 19
(AR4). By the end of 2005, nearly 20 coupled climate from the Chinese Meteorological Administration.
models worldwide have finished twentieth-century cli- Within each region, temperatures of different grid
mate simulations. While great effort should still be de- points were correlated at the 5% significant level
voted to the comparison of the observed and simulated (Wang et al. 1998). An area-weighted averaging was
global mean temperatures, stricter standards should be used to derive the mean temperature of the whole of
used in the model validations, including the twentieth- continental China. The uncertainty range in annual
century time evolution of regional average tempera- mean temperature of China is 0.27C for 18801910
ture. Acceptable performances of climate models in re- and 0.16C for 191150 on average (Wang et al.
producing the current state of regional climate are the 2001). The observational time series of global and
bases for developing credible geographical distributions Northern Hemispheric mean temperatures are from
of future climate change through IPCC scenario simu- Jones et al. (1999) and Jones and Moberg (2003). The
lations (e.g., Kimoto 2005). Previous results based on anomalies were calculated relative to the 196190
coupled climate models show considerable differences mean. The monthly SAT data from 160 stations for
in regional details (Giorgi et al. 2001). Observational 195199 compiled by the Chinese Meteorological Ad-
analyses indicated that the distinctive climate variation ministration are also used. These station SAT data have
over China could be attributed to multicontributions, been widely used in studies of the East Asian climate
for example, a unique cloudradiative feedback (Yu et (e.g., Hu et al. 2003; Zhou and Yu 2005).
al. 2004a), teleconnections (Yu and Zhou 2004; Li et al. The twentieth-century climate simulations by coupled
2005; Zhao et al. 2005; Xin et al. 2006), and the strato- climate models used for the IPCC AR4 are often called
spheretroposphere exchange (Yu et al. 2004b). The by the project name: The Twentieth-Century Climate
main motivation of this paper is to examine the extent in Coupled Models (20C3M). The twentieth-century
to which the twentieth-century coupled model integra- climate simulations were made with various combina-
tions can reproduce the observed major variations and tions of forcings including greenhouse gases (GHGs),
warming trend of SAT over China. The ability of the sulfate aerosols, ozone, volcanic aerosols, and solar
models to reproduce the twentieth-century Chinese variability. The focus of this paper is the SAT during
temperature will serve as the basis for deriving uncer- 18801999, over which 19 models provided data. The
tainty measures for future climate change over East names of the models analyzed are listed in Table 1,
Asia. together with the natural and anthropogenic forcings
The outline of the paper is as follows. Section 2 in- used by the different modeling groups in their IPCC
troduces the data and methods used in the analyses. 20C3M simulations. Table 1 is compiled using informa-
Section 3 starts with a description of the observational tion that the participating modeling centers provided to
variation of Chinese SAT, and follows with detailed the U.S. Department of Energys Program for Climate
analyses of the twentieth-century SAT over China and Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI) (see
the globe simulated by coupled climate models. The http://www-pcmdi.llnl.gov/ipcc/about_ipcc.php for
time-scale dependence of the simulated SAT evolution more information about the models). Since these mod-
and its recent warming trend are also addressed in sec- els employ different horizontal resolutions, the Chi-
tion 3. Section 4 presents a discussion. A summary is nese-domain-averaged SAT in the simulations is de-
given in section 5. fined as the area-weighted average of three rectangular
boxes: (2850N, 8097.5E), (22.543N, 97.5
122.5E), and (4354N, 117.5130E). To further dis-
2. Data and analysis method
cuss the regional difference, we consider east China as
The published observational time series of annual two parts: north China (3543N, 102.5122.5E), and
mean SAT of China covers the period from 1880 to south China (22.535N, 102.5122.5E). Regional
2002 (Wang et al. 1998; Wang and Gong 2000; Wang et time series is calculated as the area-weighted average
al. 2001). Because the modern large networks of for each box.
weather observing stations have started in 1951 in In the following analyses, linear regression is used in
China, in order to estimate annual mean temperature the detrending and the estimation of trends. To quan-
series of China from 1880 to 1950, historical documen- titatively reveal the spread and convergence of the cli-
tary data together with several proxy data were used as mate models in reproducing the twentieth-century
a supplement to instrumental records (Wang et al. SAT, one widely used technique, namely, analysis of
2001). Continental China was divided into nine regions variance, is employed (Harzallah and Sadourny 1995;
according to spatial correlation among the 1 1 grid- Li 1999). Assume that x is the time series of the global
ded annual mean SAT data from 1951 to 2002 obtained mean SAT, x(n, t). Here x(n, t) represents the nth mem-
15 NOVEMBER 2006 ZHOU AND YU 5845
TABLE 1. Forcings used in IPCC simulations of twentieth-century climate: SO solar irradiance, LU land use change, VL
volcanic aerosols, BC black carbon, SD Sulfate aerosol direct effects, OC organic carbon, SI sulfate aerosol indirect effects,
MD mineral dust, GHG well-mixed greenhouse gases, SS sea salt, and O tropospheric and stratospheric ozone. A letter Y
denotes inclusion of a specific time-varying forcing, with changes on interannual and longer time scales. Forcings that were varied over
the seasonal cycle only, or not at all, are identified with a dash. A question mark indicates a case where there is uncertainty regarding
inclusion of the forcing.
Model SO VL SD SI GHG O LU BC OC MD SS
BCC-CM1a Y Y Y
BCCR-BCM2 Y Y
CGCM3.1(T47) Y Y Y
CGCM3.1(T63) Y Y Y
CCSM3 Y Y Y Y Y Y
CNRM-CM3 Y Y Y Y ? Y Y
CSIRO-Mk3.0 Y Y ? ? ?
ECHAM5/MPI-OM Y Y Y Y
FGOALS-g1.0 Y Y Y
GFDL-CM2.0 Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
GFDL-CM2.1 Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
GISS_AOM Y Y Y
GISS_ER Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
INM-CM3.0b Y Y Y Y Y
IPSL-CM4 Y Y Y
MRI-CGCM2.3.2 Y Y Y Y
MIROC3.2(medres)c Y Y Y ? Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
UKMO-HadCM3 Y Y Y Y
UKMO-HadGEM1d Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
a
BCC-CM1 Beijing Climate Center Coupled Model version 1.
b
INM-CM3.0 Institute of Numerical Mathematics Coupled Model version 3.0.
c
MIROC3.2(medres) Model for Interdisciplinary Research on Climate 3.2, medium-resolution version.
d
UKMO-HadGEM1 Met OfficeHadley Centre Global Environmental Model version 1.
simulation of length T. Two averages are defined: en- T N
semble mean and climatological mean. The multimodel 1 1
i2 xn, t xet2 . 4
ensemble mean is taken with respect to the simulation T t1 N n1
count N:
It is easy to show that the total variance, defined by
N the squared total standard deviation,
1
xet xn, t, 1
N n1 N T
xn, t x ,
1
t2 c
2
5
and the climatological mean is taken with respect to the NT n1 t1
numbers of years T and simulations N: is the sum of the external and internal variance:
N T T
xn, t T x t.
1 1 t2 2e i2. 6
xc e 2
NT n1 t1 t1 The signal-to-noise ratio is defined as
The interannual variability can be represented by the e
year-to-year variation of the ensemble means xe(t). The . 7
i
standard deviation e of the xe(t) is used to measure the
external, or forced, signal. The dispersion of the simu- To estimate the difference of the SAT trends among
lation [measured by the standard deviation i of x(n, t)] single-model ensemble runs, the spread is defined as
indicates the intermodel variability, which is noise for
the twentieth-century climate reproduction. From the N
1
definition of the two averages, we have yn yc2, 8
N n1
T
x t x
1 where y is the trend of JuneAugust (JJA) or Decem-
2e e c
2
3
T t1 berFebruary (DJF)] mean SAT. Here y(n) represents
5846 JOURNAL OF CLIMATE VOLUME 19
FIG. 2. The (a) global, (b) Northern Hemispheric, and (c) Chinese average surface air temperature anomalies simulated by the 20C3M
models. Each thin color line corresponds to run1 of each model. CSIRO-Mk3.0 and FGOALS-g1.0 are excluded from the ensemble
mean of global and Northern Hemispheric average. CSIRO-Mk3.0, UKMO-HadCM3, and FGOALS-g1.0 are excluded from the
ensemble mean of Chinese average.
15 NOVEMBER 2006 ZHOU AND YU 5847
5848 JOURNAL OF CLIMATE VOLUME 19
TABLE 2. Correlation coefficients between the simulated and the observed annual SAT time series from 1880 to 1999. Models without
inclusion of time-varying natural forcings are identified with italic fonts. Bold numbers are statistically significant at the 5% level. Only
run1 of each model is analyzed. CSIRO-Mk3.0 and FGOALS-g1.0 are not included in the global and Northern Hemispheric ensemble
means. CSIRO-Mk3.0, FGOALS-g1.0, and UKMO-HadCM3 are not included in the whole, north, and south China ensemble means.
(44.5%) of the total variance, with a signal-to-noise ra- sion 4 (IPSL-CM4), and the Met Office Third Hadley
tio of 1.1. Centre Coupled OceanAtmosphere General Circula-
The dispersion among the models partly comes from tion Model (UKMO-HadCM3) in Table 3]. Although
differences of forcing agents used in driving simulations the only yearly changes of the forcings in the Goddard
of the twentieth-century climate. The natural forcings Institute for Space Studies AtmosphereOcean Model
(time-varying solar irradiance and volcanic aerosols) (GISS_AOM) were PCMDIs greenhouse gases and
were not included in several models (Table 1). Large, the linear interpolation of the Boucher tropospheric
different forcing agents prescribed in the 20C3M simu- sulfate burden multiplied by a single global constant to
lations make direct comparisons among the simulations convert it to an optical depth (G. L. Russell 2005, per-
difficult. The inclusion of changes in solar irradiance sonal communication), this model still has an accept-
and volcanic aerosols, however, clearly has improved able result. Nevertheless, this does not mean that inter-
the simulations (Table 2). nal variability plays dominant roles in regulating the
Previous climate model experiments have suggested SAT before 1940, because the acceptable correlation
that the early twentieth-century warming could have comes from the warming trends. After linear detrend-
been primarily due to natural forcings, while the late ing, no significant correlation is found (Table 3), which
twentieth-century warming was likely mainly due to in- demonstrates the important contribution of natural
creases of greenhouse gases (e.g., Stott et al. 2001; forcings from another aspect. Similar conditions are
Meehl et al. 2003, 2004; Nozawa et al. 2005). We sepa- found for the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling
rate 18801999 into two periods: 18801940 and 1941 and Analysis (CCCma) Coupled General Circulation
99. Statistics corresponding to Table 2 are listed sepa- Model version 3.1 [CGCM3.1(T47) and CGCM3.1(T63)],
rately for these two periods in Tables 3 and 4 . For the and Centre National de Recherches Mtorologiques
early part of the twentieth century, without the inclu- Coupled Global Climate Model version 3 (CNRM-CM3)
sion of natural forcings, barely any model can reason- models.
ably simulate the observed variations [see the statistics For the late twentieth-century warming, all models
for Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research Bergen Cli- have high significant correlations with the observations
mate Model version 2 (BCCR-BCM2), CSIRO-Mk3.0, for both the global and Northern Hemispheric averages
ECHAM5/Max Planck Ocean Model (MPI-OM), (Table 4). By comparing runs with or without the GHG
LInstitut Pierre-Simon Laplace Coupled Model ver- forcings, Stott et al. (2000) showed the important con-
15 NOVEMBER 2006 ZHOU AND YU 5849
TABLE 3. Correlation coefficients between the simulated and the observed annual SAT time series from 1880 to 1940. Models without
inclusion of time-varying natural forcings are identified with italic fonts. Values enclosed in parentheses correspond to the correlation
after linear detrending. Bold numbers are statistically significant at the 5% level. Only run1 of each model is analyzed. Models
without time-varying natural forcings, and CSIRO-Mk3.0 and FGOALS-g1.0, are not included in the ensemble mean.
tribution of GHG to the warming over recent decades. radiative forcing in simulating the observed warming
Using a simple climate/ocean model with prescribed during recent decades. The high correlations in Table 4
climate sensitivity, Andronova and Schlesinger (2000) might result from the inclusion of GHG forcings. Since
also demonstrated the importance of the anthropogenic we only have results that show improved correlations
TABLE 4. Correlation coefficients between the simulated and the observed SAT time series for 194199. Models without inclusion of
time-varying natural forcings are identified with italic fonts. Values enclosed in parentheses correspond to the correlation after
detrending. Bold numbers are statistically significant at the 5% level. Only run1 of each model is analyzed.
TABLE 5. Linear trends of annual mean SAT in the observations and the simulations. Run1 of nineteen 20C3M models are used
in the construction of multimodel ensembles.
simulations, however, the GHG forcing is a combina- parable to the observations for the SAT over China
tion of several greenhouse gases including at least the from 1985 to 1999: the GFDL-CM2.1 has a warming
carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and chloroflu- rate of 7.6C per century, and the GISS_ER and
orocarbon. These forcing data are not available in the UKMO-HadGEM1 have rates of 6.4 and 7.8C per
IPCC data archive. Approximately, we make detrend- century, respectively. The observed trends over China
ing by subtracting the third-order polynomial from the for the analyzed three time periods are weakly repro-
original time series of both observed and simulated duced in the SST-forced CAM2 simulation.
SATs. The residuals are mainly interannual and dec- Since there is a better coverage of observational sta-
adal to interdecadal variabilities. Compared with the tions in eastern China (east of 100E), this domain is
linear detrending, the correlation after the nonlinear selected for evaluating model-simulated spatial pat-
detrending between the observation and the multimo- terns. The trends of annual mean SAT for 195199
del ensemble for the global mean SAT from 1880 to from the observations and the simulations are esti-
1999 decreased from 0.59 to 0.55, and for Chinese SAT mated by using linear regression (Fig. 7). In the obser-
it decreased from 0.41 to 0.39. On the decadal time vations, there are cooling trends of 0.31.5C (50
scale, the correlation for detrended global (Chinese) yr)1 in southwestern China (downstream of the Ti-
SAT decreased from 0.80 (0.54) to 0.78 (0.53). On the betan Plateau) and warming trends elsewhere, in par-
interannual time scale, the corresponding results for ticular north China (Fig. 7a). The maximum warming
global (Chinese) SAT are from 0.30 to 0.29 (0.26 to signal in northeast China is above 2.0. Nine of the
0.24). All of these values are still statistically significant models show warming trends over the whole eastern
at the 5% level, indicating that the detrending method China. Four of the models incorrectly show cooling
does not change our conclusion.
trends over north China. The cooling over southwest-
ern China is only weakly simulated in three models.
e. SAT trends over different periods While most models have the ability to approximately
The most prominent feature of the twentieth-century simulate the observed evolution of Chinese mean SAT,
SAT variation is its warming trend (Fig. 1). To quanti- most of them failed to simulate the spatial patterns, in
tatively evaluate the models performances in this re- particular the cooling in southwestern China.
gard, the trends of the SAT in the observations and the The trend of Chinese SAT varies seasonally and re-
simulations for three different time periods are esti- gionally (Hu et al. 2003). We further analyze the linear
mated by using linear regression (Table 5). For the trends of SAT in summer (JJA) and winter (DJF) by
warming trends starting from 1880 to 1999, the 20C3M linear regressions. The zonal mean of the JJA SAT
simulations are 0.14, 0.14, and 0.24C per century trend for 19511999 averaged over eastern China
higher than the observations in the global, Northern (102.5122.5E) from the observations and the simu-
Hemispheric, and Chinese averages, respectively. For lations are shown in Fig. 8a. The middle part of eastern
the warming trends in the early part of the century China (2736N) experienced a moderate summertime
(191045), however, the 20C3M simulations are 0.92, cooling. The warming south of 27N is stronger than
1.08, and 2.19C per century lower than the observa- that north of 36N. All models except the GFDL-
tions. The observed accelerations of the warming trend CM2.1 failed to reproduce the cooling trend, with large
from 1985 to 1999 are also weakly simulated in the spread among them. The amplitude of the cooling in
20C3M. Three models reproduced warming rates com- GFDL-CM2.1 is close to the observations [0.5C
5854 JOURNAL OF CLIMATE VOLUME 19
15 NOVEMBER 2006 ZHOU AND YU 5855
FIG. 8. Zonal mean of the (a) JJA and (b) DJF SAT linear
trends (195199) over east China (102.5122.5E) for run1 of
the different models. The observation is shown as thick black line
[Units: C (50 yr)1].
(50 yr)1]. Results for the DJF SAT are given in Fig. 8b.
The warming trend over eastern China increases from
24 to 40N. Several models [e.g., CGCM3.1(T47) and
HadCM3] capture the meridional gradient qualita-
tively. However, many models underestimate the DJF FIG. 9. The spread of (a) JJA and (b) DJF SAT linear trends
warming trend, with cooling in a number of models (195199) among eight realizations of CCSM3 [Units: C (50
north of 35N. The spread is also much larger north of yr)1]. Values greater than 0.5 are shaded.
30N than south of it.
In above discussions, only the first realization of each lation, spreads of this model in simulating the trends of
model is analyzed. The spread among single-model en- JJA and DJF SAT are calculated according to the Eq.
semble runs should be estimated. Since the CCSM3 (8). The results are shown in Fig. 9. The spread of the
model has eight ensemble members in the 20C3M simu- SAT trends in north China is larger than that in south
FIG. 7. The distribution of the linear trend of annual mean SAT for 195199 in a single realization of the 20CM3 simulation by
different models and the observation [Units: C (50 yr)1]. Negative trends are shaded.
5856 JOURNAL OF CLIMATE VOLUME 19
China. This condition exists not only in summer but black carbon still failed to simulate the cooling trend
also in winter. North China is more strongly disturbed (figures not shown). The role of black carbon in forcing
by the internal noise, which is consistent with the large the SAT variation over China might be a possibility.
spread in north China shown in Fig. 8. Decadal variations of the large-scale circulation over
East Asia should also have contributions (Yu et al.
2004b).
4. Discussion
In addition, there are large differences among the
When driven by historical natural and anthropogenic 20C3M models in the prescribed radiative forcings.
forcings, while current state-of-the-art coupled climate Further work is required to develop improved consen-
models generally perform acceptably in simulating the taneous estimates of various radiative forcings, with the
major variations of the SAT averaged over China, there aim toward forming a standard set of forcings for the
are still large deficiencies in simulating the spatial dis- twentieth-century climate intercomparison project.
tributions. This is particularly true for the southwestern Finally, our multimodel analyses of the 20C3M re-
China, namely, downstream of the Tibetan Plateau veal an encouraging level of performance of the current
(Figs. 7 and 8). The difficulty may arise from the dis- state-of-the-art climate models in simulating the SAT
tinctive formation of the regional climate downstream variation averaged over China and a poor performance
of the Tibetan Plateau. in simulating the spatial patterns. This indicates that
Cloudradiation feedback is instrumental in under- while the future climate change scenario simulations of
standing the long-term climatic trends over central east- IPCC AR4 might be valuable in the context of the Chi-
ern China (Yu et al. 2004a). Li et al. (2005) showed the nese domain average, the projected spatial distributions
importance of the cloudradiation feedback in ampli- might be highly suspect. Considering the shortcomings
fying the cooling trend downstream of the Tibetan Pla- of the climate models in simulating the twentieth-
teau. Model-based attribution of regional SAT varia- century climate, any plans to produce a credible geo-
tion includes large uncertainty due to the uncertainty of graphical distribution of future climate change over
cloud feedback processes. Our analyses have identified China will be beyond the ability of current state-of-the-
the discrepancies of climate models in simulating the art climate models. This casts a shadow upon the effort
observed regional SAT variation. The physics govern- toward developing credible geographical distributions
ing these responses, in particular the cloudradiation of future climate change through IPCC scenario simu-
process will be the subject of a subsequent study. lations.
Besides the cloudradiation feedback, teleconnec-
tions also contribute to the SAT variation over China.
5. Summary
In contrast with global warming trends, a strong cooling
trend occurs in early spring and late summer in the lee We have analyzed the variations of the twentieth-
side of the Tibetan Plateau. This cooling is associated century SAT over China and the globe from observa-
with an eastward extension of a cooling signal originat- tions and 19 coupled climate models included in IPCC
ing from North Africa, which is related to the positive AR4. The major results are summarized as follows.
trend of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO; Yu and Similar to global and Northern Hemispheric mean
Zhou 2004). Further analyses indicate that barely any SAT, most coupled climate models are able to simulate
model of 20C3M could reasonably simulate the ob- the major variations and upward of the SAT averaged
served positive trend of the NAO in recent decades. over China in the twentieth-century climate simula-
Both IPSL-CM4 and UKMO-HadGEM1 moderately tions. The correlation between the observed and simu-
exhibit the linear trends of the NAO; the NAO-related lated Chinese SAT for 18801999 (r 0.55) is, how-
SAT anomalies are, however, distorted by the bias in ever, lower than that for either the global (r 0.87) or
the simulation of the NAO pattern (figures not shown). the Northern Hemispheric (r 0.82) average. For the
Explanation of the cause of the cooling downstream global mean SAT, the forced signal is approximately 2
of the Tibetan Plateau has been extremely controver- times larger than the internal noise. For the SAT aver-
sial. A few works have established the links between aged over China, the internal noise is larger than the
the SAT variations and the changes in aerosols (Qian forced signal.
and Giorgi 1999; Qian et al. 2001; Xu 2001). Among the Both GHG and natural external forcings contribute
analyzed models, only the GFDL-CM2.1 partly re- to the global and hemispheric average SAT variations
sembles the observations in the cooling pattern (figure in the early twentieth century, as shown by improved
not shown). Many models that are forced with time- correlation with the GHG forcing and still significant
varying forcings of anthropogenic aerosols including correlation after detrending the SAT. The SAT over
15 NOVEMBER 2006 ZHOU AND YU 5857
China before 1940 in the coupled climate models cor- Coupled Modelling (WGCM) and their Coupled Model
relates with observations mainly because of the warm- Intercomparison Project (CMIP) and Climate Simula-
ing trend. After removing this trend, there is no signifi- tion Panel for organizing the model data analysis activ-
cant correlation between the observed and the simu- ity, and the IPCC WG1 TSU for technical support. The
lated SAT. Both the GHG and other forcings such as IPCC Data Archive at Lawrence Livermore National
anthropogenic aerosols contribute to the SAT variation Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science, U.S.
over China in the last half of the twentieth century. Department of Energy. This work was jointly sup-
Chinese SAT from 1941 to 1999 in multimodel en- ported by the Chinese Academy of Sciences through its
semble mean estimate is significantly correlated with Knowledge Innovation Program (KZCX3-SW-221),
the observations, even after removing the warming the Major State Basic Research Development Program
trend. Note these correlation results with or without of China (973 Program) under Grant 2005CB321703,
detrending are not sufficient to make conclusions about the International Partnership Creative Group entitled
GHGs role since the detrended signal is not necessarily The Climate System Model Development and Appli-
the GHG-induced warming; further runs without the cation Studies, and the National Natural Science
GHG are encouraged for the international modeling Foundation of China (40375029, 40233031). We thank
groups. Mr. Xinyu Wen for performing the SST-forced CAM2
There is strong time-scale dependence in the simu- integration on the Lenovo DeepComp 6800 supercom-
lated SAT variations. The prescribed natural and an- puter at the Supercomputing Center of the Chinese
thropogenic external forcings in the coupled climate Academy of Sciences.
models mainly simulated the observed warming trends
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