The National Tibetan Plateau Data Center of China, as a research paper related data warehouse, has recently published “A long-term (1979-2020) high-resolution (1/30°) precipitation dataset for the Third Polar region (TPHiPr)” developed by Professor Yang Kun’s Research Group of Tsinghua University. The related article titled “TPHiPr: a long-term (1979–2020) high-accuracy precipitation dataset (1/30°, daily) for the Third Pole region based on high-resolution atmospheric modeling and dense observations” has been published in Earth System Science Data.

High-accuracy precipitation data serves as an essential basis for the study of land surface processes. However, due to the complex terrain, high spatial variability of precipitation is typical in the Third Pole (TP) region. Limited by the geographical and traffic conditions, the rain gauges are mostly distributed in low altitude and eastern areas. At the same time, the existing gridded precipitation data also have great uncertainties in the TP, mainly manifested as follows: (1) Gridded precipitation products based on satellite and site interpolation can hardly reflect the impact of complex terrain on precipitation distribution and may underestimate solid precipitation; (2) current atmospheric simulation-based datasets consistently overestimate precipitation amount in the TP.

Accordingly, the researchers produce a long-term (1979–2020) high-resolution (1/30^∘, daily) high-accuracy precipitation dataset (TPHiPr) for the TP by merging the atmospheric simulation-based ERA5_CNN generated by downscaling the long-term ERA5 precipitation through machine learning with gauge observations from more than 9000 rain gauges. Combining high-resolution WRF simulation, this dataset can better reflect the spatial variation of precipitation given complex terrains in the TP, and its precipitation amount is lower than ERA5-Land and higher than merged products based on satellite data (Fig. 1). Validation based on independent gauge data demonstrates that this dataset is remarkably better (in terms of accuracy) than the widely used datasets, including the latest generation of reanalysis (ERA5-Land), the state-of-the-art satellite-based dataset (IMERG) and the multi-source merging datasets (MSWEP v2 and AERA5-Asia). (Fig. 2) The dataset can provide relatively reliable precipitation dataset with high accuracy for the TP, which may have broad applications in meteorological, hydrological and ecological studies.

Fig. 1 Spatial patterns of (a–e) the average annual precipitation during 2008–2015 from the five datasets and (f–i) the relative differences between TPHiPr and the other four datasets. The differences are calculated by subtracting TPHiPr from the other four datasets and then dividing by TPHiPr.

Fig. 2 TPHiPr validation results based on data of independent gauges and comparison of (a) Rbias (%); (b) RMSE (mm d^-1) and (c) CC.

This dataset has been co-developed by Postdoctoral Fellow Jiang Yaozhi and Professor Yang Kun of the DESS, Tsinghua University in conjunction with researchers of the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources and the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Sichuan University, Qinghua Provincial Meteorological Bureau and Institute of Desert Meteorology, China Meteorological Administration, Urumqi. This research has been supported by the Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research Program (STEP) (grant no. 2019QZKK0206), the Basic Science Center for Tibetan Plateau Earth System of the National Science Foundation of China (grant no. 41988101), and the National Key Research and Development Program of China (grant no. 2018YFC1507505).

Article information:

Jiang, Y., Yang, K., Qi, Y., Zhou, X., He, J., Lu, H., Li, Xin, Chen, Y., Li, Xiaodong, Zhou, B., Mamtimin, A., Shao, C., Ma, X., Tian, J., Zhou, J., 2023. TPHiPr: a long-term (1979–2020) high-accuracy precipitation dataset (1/30◦, daily) for the Third Pole region based on high-resolution atmospheric modeling and dense observations. Earth Syst. Sci. Data 15, 621–638. https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-15-621-2023.

Data information:

Yang, K., Jiang, Y., 2022. A long-term (1979-2020) high-resolution (1/30°) precipitation dataset for the Third Polar region (TPHiPr). National Tibetan Plateau/Third Pole Environment Data Center. https://doi.org/10.11888/Atmos.tpdc.272763. https://cstr.cn/18406.11.Atmos.tpdc.272763.

Written by Jiang Yaozhi and Yang Kun