A critical remark on the applicability of E‐OBS European gridded temperature data set for validating control climate simulations

Abstract

[1] The study compares daily maximum (T max ) and minimum (T min ) temperatures in two data sets interpolated from irregularly spaced meteorological stations to a regular grid: the European gridded data set (E-OBS), produced from a relatively sparse network of stations available in the European Climate Assessment and Dataset (ECA&D) project, and a data set gridded onto the same grid from a high-density network of stations in the Czech Republic (GriSt). We show that large differences exist between the two gridded data sets, particularly for T min . The errors tend to be larger in tails of the distributions. In winter, temperatures below the 10% quantile of T min , which is still far from the very tail of the distribution, are too warm by almost 2°C in E-OBS on average. A large bias is found also for the diurnal temperature range. Comparison with simple average series from stations in two regions reveals that differences between GriSt and the station averages are minor relative to differences between E-OBS and either of the two data sets. The large deviations between the two gridded data sets affect conclusions concerning validation of temperature characteristics in regional climate model (RCM) simulations. The bias of the E-OBS data set and limitations with respect to its applicability for evaluating RCMs stem primarily from (1) insufficient density of information from station observations used for the interpolation, including the fact that the stations available may not be representative for a wider area, and (2) inconsistency between the radii of the areal average values in high-resolution RCMs and E-OBS. Further increases in the amount and quality of station data available within ECA&D and used in the E-OBS data set are essentially needed for more reliable validation of climate models against recent climate on a continental scale.Citation: Kyselý, J., and E. Plavcová (2010), A critical remark on the applicability of E-OBS European gridded temperature data set for validating control climate simulations,

Scaling precipitation extremes with temperature in the Mediterranean: past climate assessment and projection in anthropogenic scenarios

“…E-OBS has been widely used for regional climate model evaluation (e.g. Lorenz and Jacob 2010;Nikulin et al 2011;Samuelsson et al 2011;Torma et al 2011;Flaounas et al 2013;Stéfanon et al 2014) and has been comprehensively evaluated in the literature (Hofstra et al 2009(Hofstra et al , 2010Kysel and Plavcov 2010;Flaounas et al 2012;Herrera et al 2012). In the E-OBS version 10 used here substantial improvements were realized, especially by increasing the station density (around 2000 for v1 and v2 vs. more than 4200 stations for temperature and more than 7300 for precipitation in v10).…”

Assessing gridded observations for daily precipitation extremes in the Alps with a focus on northwest Italy

“…Unfortunately, a number of studies have shown a potential weakness of this dataset in regions of sparse data (see, e.g. Kyselý and Plavcová, 2010;Herrera et al, 2012;Maraun et al, 2012, for the Czech Republic, Spain and UK, respectively). Hofstra et al (2009) compare MAP and EOBS (first version) over the GAR domain, finding a general underestimation of EOBS, larger errors in the Alps, and an overestimation of extreme precipitation.…”

Spatial gridding of daily maximum and minimum temperatures in Europe

“…For example, the RKK method showed a similar performance to the E-OBS data set (Haylock et al 2008), and was similarly limited in regions with low station density. Kyselý and Plavcová (2010) recently demonstrated this for the E-OBS data set by comparison with an alternative data set that was generated from a high-density network in the Czech Republic.…”