S. Wild

Consistency of Temperature and Precipitation Extremes across Various Global Gridded In Situ and Reanalysis Datasets

AbstractChanges in climate extremes are often monitored using global gridded datasets of climate extremes based on in situ observations or reanalysis data. This study assesses the consistency of temperature and precipitation extremes between these datasets. Both the temporal evolution and spatial patterns of annual extremes of daily values are compared across multiple global gridded datasets of in situ observations and reanalyses to make inferences on the robustness of the obtained results.While normalized time series generally compare well, the actual values of annual extremes of daily data differ systematically across the different datasets. This is partly related to different computational approaches when calculating the gridded fields of climate extremes. There is strong agreement between extreme temperatures in the different in situ–based datasets. Larger differences are found for temperature extremes from the reanalyses, particularly during the presatellite era, indicating that reanalyses are most c...