Evaluating long-term trends in annual precipitation: A temporal consistency analysis of ERA5 data in the Alps and Italy

Abstract

Reanalyses are utilized for calculating climatological trends due to their focus on temporal consistency. ERA5 reanalysis family has proven to be a valuable and widely used product for trend extraction. This study specifically examines long-term trends in total annual precipitation across two climatic hotspots: the Alps and Italy. It is acknowledged by reanalysis producers that variations in the observational systems used for data assimilation impact water cycle components like precipitation. This understanding highlights the need of assessing to what extent temporal variations in ERA5 precipitation amounts are solely a result of climate variations and the influence of changes in the observational system impacting simulation accuracy. Our research examines the differences between ERA5 and similar reanalyses against homogenized, trend-focused observational datasets. We find that discerning the climatological signal within ERA5 adjustments for observational system variations is challenging. The trend in ERA5 from 1940 to 1970 shows distinct patterns over the Alps and, to a lesser extent, Italy, diverging from later ERA5 trends and those in other reanalyses. Notably, ERA5 shows an increasing, although nonlinear, trend in the deviation between ERA5 and the observational datasets. Improving future reanalysis interpretability could involve adopting a model-only integration for the same period, akin to the ERA-20C and ERA-20CM approach.