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This paper examines variations of the surface air temperature (SAT) over China and the globe in the twentieth century simulated by 19 coupled climate models driven by historical natural and anthropogenic forcings. Most models perform well in simulating both the global and the Northern Hemispheric mean SAT evolutions of the twentieth century. The inclusion of natural forcings improves the simulation, in particular for the first half of the century. The reproducibility of the SAT averaged over China is lower than that of the global and hemispheric averages, but it is still acceptable. The contribution of natural forcings to the SAT over China in the first half of the century is not as robust as that to the global and hemispheric averages. No model could successfully produce the reconstructed warming over China in the 1920s. The prescribed natural and anthropogenic forcings in the coupled climate models mainly produce the warming trends and the decadal- to interdecadal-scale SAT variations with poor performances at shorter time scales. The prominent warming trend in the last half of the century over China and its acceleration in recent decades are weakly simulated. There are discrepancies between the simulated and observed regional features of the SAT trend over China. Few models could produce the summertime cooling over the middle part of eastern China (27°–36°N), while two models acceptably produce the meridional gradients of the wintertime warming trends, with north China experiencing larger warming. Limitations of the current state-of-the-art coupled climate models in simulating spatial patterns of the twentieth-century SAT over China cast a shadow upon their capability toward projecting credible geographical distributions of future climate change through Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenario simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Precipitation in China is controlled by a combination of multiple weather systems and is susceptible to their spatiotemporal variability under climate warming. Based on the daily precipitation dataset developed by the China Meteorological Administration and ERA5 6-hourly data from 1979 to 2018, we detected tropical cyclones, extratropical cyclones, and fronts affecting mainland China of an altitude less than 1500 m using objective methods and identified their individually associated precipitation. We quantified climatological characteristics of precipitation associated with these three meteorological causes and their proportion of precipitation totals, and evaluated their relative contribution to change in precipitation. Results show that precipitation associated with tropical cyclones (TCP), extratropical cyclones (ETCP), and fronts (FRTP) accounted for 3.0%, 21.2%, and 20.4% of the total precipitation in China, and constituted the largest percentage in August, June, and January, respectively. The total proportion of these three types of precipitation exceeded 50% in more than 55% of China's regions. The high-value regions of corresponding precipitation were directly related to the locations of frequent occurrences of these weather systems. TCP and FRTP increased over the past four decades, while ETCP decreased. The western part of Northeast China and the middle and upper reaches of the Yangtze River show precipitation decreases, 37.8% of which is contributed by ETCP decreases. Precipitation increased in most regions of China during the dry season, 34.1% of which is contributed by FRTP increases. Among them, Northeast (Northwest) China significantly increased it precipitation by 14.4% decade−1 (21.8% decade−1), 33.6% (51.3%) of which is contributed by FRTP increases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]