Tibetan three-dimensional clouds fields derived from JICA data

Clouds highly impact the Earth's radiation budget. Their vertical distributions play key roles in the diabatic heating of the atmosphere. The spatial and temporal distributions of clouds over Tibetan Plateau make up an important part of the world hydrological cycle. Therefore, accurately estimation of clouds distributions over Tibetan Plateau is not only meaningful for our understanding of plateau climate systems, but also can improve accuracy of radiation budget and rainfall simulations in climate models. Using the data of Comprehensive observation Data on Tibetan plateau from Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) China-Japan climate disasters mitigation project(JICA project), we simulated three-dimensional clouds with the aid of Local Analysis and Prediction System (LAPS). We further evaluated the importance of Tibetan comprehensive observations in the simulations of three-dimensional cloud distributions through following two schemes:1) with JICA AWX and sounding data ingested;2)with these data omitted. Our results show that Tibetan automatic weather station and sounding data can much improve the accuracy of simulated three-dimensional cloud distributions. Compared with Tibetan observation data omitted, the spatial distributions of simulated clouds with these observation data are much more consistent with those of satellite observations.