Comparisons Of 1-Hour-Averaged Surface Temperatures From High-Resolution Reanalysis Data And Surface Observations

Comparisons between two different surface temperatures from high-resolution ECMWF ReAnalysis 5 (ERA5) and Automated Synoptic Observing System (ASOS) observations were performed to investigate the reliability of the new reanalysis data over South Korea. As ERA5 has been recently produced and provided to the public, it will be highly used in various research fields. The analysis period in this study is limited to 1999-2018 because regularly recorded hourly data have been provided for 61 ASOS stations since 1999. Topographic characteristics of the 61 ASOS locations are classified as inland, coastal, and mountain based on Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data. The spatial distributions of whole period time-averaged temperatures for ASOS and ERA5 were similar without significant differences in their values. Scatter plots between ASOS and ERA5 for three different periods of yearlong, summer, and winter confirmed the characteristics of seasonal variability, also shown in the time-series of monthly error probability density functions (PDFs). Statistical indices NMB, RMSE, R, and IOA were adopted to quantify the temperature differences, which showed no significant differences in all indices, as R and IOA were all close to 0.99. In particular, the daily mean temperature differences based on 1-hour-averaged temperature had a smaller error than the classical daily mean temperature differences, showing a higher correlation between the two data. To check if the complex topography inside one ERA5 grid cell is related to the temperature differences, the kurtosis and skewness values of 90-m DEM PDFs in a ERA5 grid cell were compared to the one-year period amplitude among those of the power spectrum in the time-series of monthly temperature error PDFs at each station, showing positive correlations. The results account for the topographic effect as one of the largest possible drivers of the difference between ASOS and ERA5.