Trends and Variability of Atmospheric Downward Longwave Radiation Over China From 1958 to 2015

Abstract Surface downward longwave radiation (SDLR) is a major component of the energy budget. Although studies have reported the spatiotemporal variations of SDLR in China, the spatiotemporal coverage of the situ measurements used is always limited. In this study, the gradient boosting regression tree (GBRT) was developed to reconstruct SDLR based on air temperature (Ta), relative humidity (RH), and downward shortwave radiation (DSR). Ground measurements collected at the Baseline Surface Radiation Network (BSRN) and the Arid and Semi‐arid Region Collaborative Observation Project (ASRCOP) were used to build and evaluate the GBRT model. The evaluation results showed that the daily SDLR estimates are correlated well with the SDLR in situ, with an overall root mean square errors (RMSE) of 16.5 Wm−2 and a correlation coefficient (R) value of 0.91 for the validation data set. Comparison with existing SDLR products showed that accuracy and trends of the SDLR estimates based on the GBRT method are reasonable. To obtain long‐term SDLR data for spatiotemporal analysis over China, densely distributed reconstructed DSR and ground measured Ta and RH collected at 756 Chinese Meteorological Administration (CMA) stations were used as input to estimate the SDLR based on the GBRT method over China during 1958–2015. The long‐term estimated SDLRs at the selected 563 stations showed that SDLR increased at an average rate of 1.3 Wm−2 per decade over China from 1958 to 2015. The trend of SDLR is positively correlated with the trend in Ta and water vapor pressure, whereas negatively correlated with the trend in DSR.