Cheng et al. (2025) Decadal Climatology and Trends in Oceanic Precipitation from Multiple Satellite and Reanalysis Datasets

⚠️ Warning: This summary was generated from the abstract only, as the full text was not available.

Identification

• Journal: Journal of Climate
• Year: 2025
• Date: 2025-11-21
• Authors: Si Cheng, Lisa V. Alexander, Steven C. Sherwood, Joaquin Blanco
• DOI: 10.1175/jcli-d-25-0071.1

Research Groups

The abstract does not explicitly list specific research groups, labs, or departments involved in the study, but refers to the use of data from the Frequent Rainfall Observations on Grids (FROGS) database.

Short Summary

This study examines climatologies and trends in global oceanic precipitation using 27 satellite and reanalysis datasets from 2001 to 2020. It finds that latest-version satellite products generally show an upward ocean-mean trend and better align with the "wet gets wetter, dry gets drier" hypothesis compared to reanalysis datasets, which often suggest declining trends.

Objective

• To examine climatologies and trends in global oceanic precipitation using a collection of state-of-the-art satellite and reanalysis datasets, and to assess their consistency with the "wet gets wetter, dry gets drier" (WWDD) hypothesis.

Study Configuration

• Spatial Scale: Global oceans, with data on a 1° × 1° resolution grid.
• Temporal Scale: Daily data from 2001 to 2020 (20 years).

Methodology and Data

• Models used: Reanalysis models (specific names not provided in abstract).
• Data sources:
  • 27 state-of-the-art satellite datasets.
  • Reanalysis datasets.
  • Frequent Rainfall Observations on Grids (FROGS) database.
  • Sea surface temperature (SST) trends for consistency assessment.

Main Results

• Reanalysis datasets generally report higher annual-mean daily precipitation than satellite datasets.
• The humid tropics exhibit the greatest absolute discrepancies in precipitation rates, while arid regions (e.g., southeast Pacific and Atlantic) show substantial relative differences among products.
• Most latest-version satellite products show an upward ocean-mean trend, whereas reanalyses suggest declining trends.
• Latest-version satellite products on average more closely follow the "wet gets wetter, dry gets drier" (WWDD) pattern, with agreements over more than half of the oceanic regions.
• Reanalyses on average show a pronounced decrease over the intertropical convergence zone.
• The precipitation trend in averaged reanalyses exhibits the weakest consistency with sea surface temperature trends in wet regions (34.2%), compared with dry regions in averaged reanalyses (53.4%) and both wet (59.6%) and dry (58.5%) regions in averaged latest-version satellite products.
• Overall, latest-version satellite trends, despite product diversity, tend to align better on average with the WWDD hypothesis than reanalyses.

Contributions

• Provides a comprehensive comparison of climatologies and trends in global oceanic precipitation across a large ensemble of 27 satellite and reanalysis datasets.
• Assesses the agreement of different data types (satellite vs. reanalysis) with the "wet gets wetter, dry gets drier" hypothesis.
• Highlights significant discrepancies in precipitation rates and trends between satellite and reanalysis products, particularly in humid and arid oceanic regions.
• Offers a recommendation for the use of latest-version satellite products for global oceanic precipitation investigations, while advising caution with reanalysis datasets.

Funding

The abstract does not provide information regarding funding for this research.

Citation

@article{Cheng2025Decadal,
  author = {Cheng, Si and Alexander, Lisa V. and Sherwood, Steven C. and Blanco, Joaquin},
  title = {Decadal Climatology and Trends in Oceanic Precipitation from Multiple Satellite and Reanalysis Datasets},
  journal = {Journal of Climate},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.1175/jcli-d-25-0071.1},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1175/jcli-d-25-0071.1}
}