Century-Long Variations in Surface Incident Solar Radiation Over Japan——Characterized by Observations and Reanalyses

Abstract

Surface incident solar radiation (R _s ) is of great importance in determining the energy balance in the Earth system. In this study, we use century-long homogenized observations over Japan to constrain five 20th century reanalyses to explore their performance in reproducing R _s variation on different time scales (high-frequency components [HFCs], for signals with cycles less than 10 years; low-frequency components [LFCs], for signals with cycles more than 10 years) by ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) method and to quantify the impact factors on the R _s estimations by the sum of tree (SOT) model. It is found that ERA20C, ERA20CM and CERA20C overestimated R _s by 0.48–1.49 W/m⁻², while 20CRv2c and 20CRv3 underestimated R _s by −0.63 and −1.18 W/m⁻², respectively for 1931–2010. Poor correlation coefficient (R) was found to be 0.10 for ERA20CM and 0.22 for 20CRv2c. 20CRv2c failed for 1931–1960 but improved considerably for 1961–2010. 20CRv3 uses an upgraded model and assimilates more observations compared with its predecessor 20CRv2c; however, only the original components and HFCs in R _s were improved, with nearly no improvement in the LFCs. In general, CERA20C R _s , with small biases and higher R of 0.73 for original signals, 0.83 for HFCs and LFCs, is superior to other reanalyses. No obvious trend in clear sky R _s demonstrated that reanalysed R _s are insensitive to the aerosol forcings. Therefore, cloud cover and water vapour maybe the main factors influenced reanalysed R _s . Most of time, R _s is more sensitive to cloud cover than vapour pressure for all reanalyses except original signals (with contribution ratio of 0.29 for cloud cover and 0.71 for vapour pressure) and LFCs (with contribution ratio of 0.41 for cloud cover and 0.59 for vapour pressure) in CERA20C, and original signals (with contribution ratio of 0.37 for cloud cover and 0.63 for vapour pressure) in ERA20C. This work pointed out that aerosol related processes such as aerosol forcings or aerosol radiative effect in reanalyses should be improved in the future, which will ultimately improve the interaction between aerosol and cloud in R _s simulations.