Development of a high-resolution near-surface meteorological forcing dataset for the Third Pole region

Recently, the Third Pole(TP) region has experienced rapid environmental changes. Meteorological data are essential for hydrometeorological and ecological applications but still have large uncertainties on the TP owing to the heterogeneous land surface, complex terrain, and sparse weather stations. In this study, a long-term(1979–2020) high-resolution(1/30°) meteorological forcing dataset for the TP(TPMFD) was developed, as a sister to the widely used China Meteorological Forcing Dataset(CMFD). The TPMFD comprises seven components necessary for driving land surface models. We have previously contributed precipitation and downward shortwave radiation data for the TPMFD, and this study presents the development of five other components and focuses on validations for all components. Specifically, 2-meter air temperature, 2-meter specific humidity, 10-meter wind speed, and surface air pressure were generated by combining the fifth-generation atmospheric reanalysis for European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts(ERA5), a short-term high-resolution atmospheric simulation, and in situ observations, and the downward longwave radiation was calculated using semi-physical parameterization. Both cross-validation and independent-validation demonstrated that most variables in the developed dataset outperformed those in widely used reanalysis datasets, including ERA5, ERA5-Land, and the Global Land Data Assimilation System(GLDAS). This dataset is expected to be beneficial for climate analyses and modeling applications of land-surface processes on the TP.