Abstract
Due to the special natural environment over the glacier area in the Tianshan Mountains, the observation of meteorological data became difficult and is strictly scarce. Using the available data observed from the automatic meteorological station (AMS) installed on the Western Tianshan Mountain Station (WTMS) in Kyrgyzstan, the daily and seasonal variations of meteorological variables including air temperature (AT, °C), air pressure (AP, hPa), relative humidity (RH, %), and wind direction and speed (WD and WS, deg and m/s, respectively), as well as total radiation (TR, W/m2) were primarily analyzed during the period from September 2016 to May 2017. These are compared with the meteorological data obtained from the AMS in the Eastern Tianshan Mountain Station (Daxigou Station, hereafter named as ETMS) in China. Further, the comparison study between the observed data from the WTMS and the NCEP/NCAR reanalysis data was performed to test the feasibility of reanalysis data in the vicinity of the Western Tianshan Mountains. The results revealed are as follows: (1) the observed data between the WTMS and ETMS presented high correlations, and the meteorological parameters detected from the ETMS were certainly representative of the variations in the WTMS. (2) The RH in the two regions showed comparatively high values ranging from 40% to 70% indicate the abundant amount of atmospheric water vapor content near the ground in the Tianshan Mountain area. (3) The predominant WD both in the WTMS and ETMS near the ground was along the south-east direction, with the values of WS between 0 and 2 m/s were accounted the largest proportion in two stations. (4) The NCEP/NCAR reanalysis data can reflect the changes in the synoptic weather scale of AT, RH, and AP to some extent. (5) The NCEP/NCAR reanalysis data of AT and RH were underestimated by 7.2% and 45.2% in the WTMS, respectively. Whereas, the values of AP, WD, and WS were overestimated by 83.8%, 28.8%, and 74.3%, respectively over the WTMS.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Grant No. XDA20100306, National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 41565003, 91644224), Scientific Research Service fee (Grant No. IDM2018005), and Desert Meteorological Scientific Research Foundation of China (Grant No. Sqj2017011). One of the authors KRK is grateful to the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Govt. of India for the award of DST-FIST Level-1 (SR/FST/PS-1/2018/35) scheme to Department of Physcis, KLEF. The authors would like to acknowledge support from the Urumqi Institute of Desert Meteorology, China Meteorological Administration (CMA), China and Govt. of Kyrgyzstan for supporting the project in Kyrgyzstan for the establishment of Western Tianshan Mountain site located near Kara-Batkak glacier area. The authors would like to acknowledge Prof. Tianjun Zhou, the Editor-in-Chief of the journal and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and constructive suggestions towards the improvement of an earlier version of the manuscript.
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Pan, H., Huo, W., Kumar, K.R. et al. Comparison and Analysis of Meteorological Variables Observed from the Glacier Area over the Tianshan Mountains in Kyrgyzstan and China. Asia-Pacific J Atmos Sci 57, 223–233 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13143-020-00193-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13143-020-00193-3