The China Meteorological Forcing Dataset (CMFD) is the first high spatial-temporal resolution gridded near-surface meteorological dataset developed specifically for studies of land surface processes in China. The dataset was made through fusion of remote sensing products, reanalysis datasets and in-situ station data. Its record begins in January 1979 and is ongoing (currently up to December 2018) with a temporal resolution of three hours and a spatial resolution of 0.1°. Seven near-surface meteorological elements are provided in the CMFD, including 2-meter air temperature, surface pressure, and specific humidity, 10-meter wind speed, downward shortwave radiation, downward longwave radiation and precipitation rate. Validations against observations measured at independent stations show that the CMFD is of superior quality than the GLDAS (Global Land Data Assimilation System); this is because a larger number of stations are used to generate the CMFD than are utilised in the GLDAS. Due to its continuous temporal coverage and consistent quality, the CMFD is one of the most widely-used climate datasets for China.

The objective of this study is to evaluate two satellite rainfall products Global Precipitation Measurement Integrated MultisatellitE Retrievals and Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission 3B42V7 (GPM IMERG and TRMM 3B42V7) in southern Tibetan Plateau region, with special focus on the dependence of products' performance on topography and rainfall intensity. Over 500 in situ rain gauges constitute an unprecedentedly dense rain gauge network over this region and provide an exceptional resource for ground validation of satellite rainfall estimates. Our evaluation centers on the rainy season from May to October in 2014. Results indicate that (1) GPM product outperforms TRMM at all spatial scales and elevation ranges in detecting daily rainfall accumulation; (2) rainfall accumulation over the entire rainy season is negatively correlated with mean elevation for rain gauges and the two satellite rainfall products, while the performance of TRMM also significantly correlates with topographic variations; (3) in terms of the ability of rainfall detection, false alarming ratio of TRMM (21%) is larger than that of GPM (14%), while missing ratio of GPM (13%) is larger than that of TRMM (9%). GPM tends to underestimate the amount of light rain events of 0–1 mm/d, while the opposite (overestimation) is true for TRMM. GPM shows better detecting ability for light rainfall (0–5 mm/d) events but there is no detection skill for both GPM and TRMM at high‐elevation (>4500 m) regions. Our results not only highlight the superiority of GPM to TRMM in southern Tibetan Plateau region but also recommend that further improvement on the rainfall retrieval algorithm is needed by considering topographical influences for both GPM and TRMM rainfall products.

When exploited in remote sensing analysis, a reliable change rule with transfer ability can detect changes accurately and be applied widely. However, in practice, the complexity of land cover changes makes it difficult to use only one change rule or change feature learned from a given multi-temporal dataset to detect any other new target images without applying other learning processes. In this study, we consider the design of an efficient change rule having transferability to detect both binary and multi-class changes. The proposed method relies on an improved Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model to acquire and record the change information of long-term sequence remote sensing data. In particular, a core memory cell is utilized to learn the change rule from the information concerning binary changes or multi-class changes. Three gates are utilized to control the input, output and update of the LSTM model for optimization. In addition, the learned rule can be applied to detect changes and transfer the change rule from one learned image to another new target multi-temporal image. In this study, binary experiments, transfer experiments and multi-class change experiments are exploited to demonstrate the superiority of our method. Three contributions of this work can be summarized as follows: (1) the proposed method can learn an effective change rule to provide reliable change information for multi-temporal images; (2) the learned change rule has good transferability for detecting changes in new target images without any extra learning process, and the new target images should have a multi-spectral distribution similar to that of the training images; and (3) to the authors’ best knowledge, this is the first time that deep learning in recurrent neural networks is exploited for change detection. In addition, under the framework of the proposed method, changes can be detected under both binary detection and multi-class change detection.

Evidence shows a continuing increase in the frequency and severity of global heatwaves^1,2, raising concerns about the future impacts of climate change and the associated socioeconomic costs^3,4. Here we develop a disaster footprint analytical framework by integrating climate, epidemiological and hybrid input–output and computable general equilibrium global trade models to estimate the midcentury socioeconomic impacts of heat stress. We consider health costs related to heat exposure, the value of heat-induced labour productivity loss and indirect losses due to economic disruptions cascading through supply chains. Here we show that the global annual incremental gross domestic product loss increases exponentially from 0.03 ± 0.01 (SSP 245)–0.05 ± 0.03 (SSP 585) percentage points during 2030–2040 to 0.05 ± 0.01–0.15 ± 0.04 percentage points during 2050–2060. By 2060, the expected global economic losses reach a total of 0.6–4.6% with losses attributed to health loss (37–45%), labour productivity loss (18–37%) and indirect loss (12–43%) under different shared socioeconomic pathways. Small- and medium-sized developing countries suffer disproportionately from higher health loss in South-Central Africa (2.1 to 4.0 times above global average) and labour productivity loss in West Africa and Southeast Asia (2.0–3.3 times above global average). The supply-chain disruption effects are much more widespread with strong hit to those manufacturing-heavy countries such as China and the USA, leading to soaring economic losses of 2.7 ± 0.7% and 1.8 ± 0.5%, respectively.

Reliable precipitation data are highly necessary for geoscience research in the Third Pole (TP) region but still lacking, due to the complex terrain and high spatial variability of precipitation here. Accordingly, this study produces a long-term (1979–2020) high-resolution ($\mathrm{1}/\mathrm{30}$ ^∘, daily) precipitation dataset (TPHiPr) for the TP by merging the atmospheric simulation-based ERA5_CNN with gauge observations from more than 9000 rain gauges, using the climatologically aided interpolation and random forest methods. Validation shows that TPHiPr is generally unbiased and has a root mean square error of 5.0 mm d⁻¹, a correlation of 0.76 and a critical success index of 0.61 with respect to 197 independent rain gauges in the TP, demonstrating that this dataset is remarkably better than the widely used datasets, including the latest generation of reanalysis (ERA5-Land), the state-of-the-art satellite-based dataset (IMERG) and the multi-source merging datasets (MSWEP v2 and AERA5-Asia). Moreover, TPHiPr can better detect precipitation extremes compared with these widely used datasets. Overall, this study provides a new precipitation dataset with high accuracy for the TP, which may have broad applications in meteorological, hydrological and ecological studies. The produced dataset can be accessed via https://doi.org/10.11888/Atmos.tpdc.272763 (Yang and Jiang, 2022).