Cross-sectional rainfall observation on the central-western Tibetan Plateau in the warm season: System design and preliminary results.

The central and western Tibetan Plateau (CWTP) is characterized by harsh environment and strong interactions among the spheres of earth as well as significant changes in climate and water cycles over the past four decades. The lack of precipitation observations is a bottleneck for the study of land surface processes in this region. Over the past six years, we have designed and established two observation transects across the south-north and the west-east in this region to obtain hourly rainfall data during the warm season (May–September). The south-north transect extends from Yadong Valley on the southern slope of the Himalayas to Shuanghu County in the hinterland of the plateau, with a total of 31 stations; the west-east transect extends from Shiquanhe in the west to Naqu in the central TP, with a total of 22 stations. The observation dataset has been applied to clarify the spatiotemporal characteristics of precipitation in the CWTP, to evaluate the quality of typical gridded precipitation products, to support the development of regional climate models, and to reveal the processes of summertime lake-air interactions. The observation dataset has been released in the National Tibetan Plateau Data Center. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]