Comparison of climatological characteristics of several hydrometeors in China and the surrounding region

Hydrometeors and their characteristics, including cloud water path (CWP), liquid water path (LWP), ice water path (IWP), liquid water content (LWC), and ice water content (IWC), are important cloud physics parameters. Investigation of spatial-temporal variations of these hydrometeors is conducive to better understanding of the radiative property and forcing effects of clouds, which will be helpful for improvements of numerical prediction models. In this paper, the climatological characteristics of horizontal and vertical distributions of hydrometeors over China and its surrounding region are analyzed based on several popular satellite observation datasets from ISCCP, MODIS, CloudSat and two reanalysis datasets from CFSR and ERA-Interim. The results indicate that the spatial distribution, the first leading mode of the EOF and monthly average time series of CWP derived from MODIS, ERA and CFSR datasets are relatively consistent in different regions, but they are distinctly inconsistent with those from ISCCP regarding to both absolute value and amplitude variation. The LWP in ERA-Interim is the highest while that from satellite datasets of ISCCP and MODIS are much lower. In terms of IWP, the differences among various datasets are remarkable in horizontal and vertical distributions as well as absolute values. These results provide information about the "uncertainty" of these hydrometeors products, which in turn will be helpful for better estimation of cloud radiation effects and its importance in climate change study.