Evaluation of GLDAS-1 and GLDAS-2 Forcing Data and Noah Model Simulations over China at the Monthly Scale

The Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS) is an important data source for global water cycle research. Using ground-based measurements over continental China, the monthly scale forcing data (precipitation and air temperature) during 1979–2010 and model outputs (runoff, water storage, and evapotranspiration) during 2002–10 of GLDAS models [focusing on GLDAS, version 1 (GLDAS-1)/Noah and GLDAS, version 2 (GLDAS-2)/Noah] are evaluated. Results show that GLDAS-1 has serious discontinuity issues in its forcing data, with large precipitation errors in 1996 and large temperature errors during 2000–05. While the bias correction of the GLDAS-2 precipitation data greatly improves temporal continuity and reduces the biases, it makes GLDAS-2 precipitation less correlated with observed precipitation and makes it have larger mean absolute errors than GLDAS-1 precipitation for most months over the year. GLDAS-2 temperature data are superior to GLDAS-1 temperature data temporally and spatially. The results also show that the change rates of terrestrial water storage (TWS) data by GLDAS and the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) do not match well in most areas of China, and both GLDAS-1 and GLDAS-2 are not very capable of capturing the seasonal variation in monthly TWS change observed by GRACE. Runoff is underestimated in the exorheic basins over China, and runoff simulations of GLDAS-2 are much more accurate than those of GLDAS-1 for two of the three major river basins of China investigated in this study. Evapotranspiration is overestimated in the exorheic basins in China by both GLDAS-1 and GLDAS-2, whereas the overestimation of evapotranspiration by GLDAS-2 is less than that by GLDAS-1.