Abstract: The capabilities of the latest global climate models in simulating the precipitation in China from 1980 to 2005 have been assessed from the results of multiple precipitation observations and outputs from 43 models that participate in the fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5). As shown from the results, most of the CMIP5 models can reproduce the basic spatial pattern that the precipitation increases from the northwest to the southeast in China. Most CMIP5 models simulate less precipitation in South China and more in the western part of the Tibet Plateau than the observations, which is similar to the results in models that participate in the third phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP3). The seasonal variation of wet summer and dry winter can be well captured, but the magnitude of precipitation is overestimated by the models. From the results of EOF analyses, most CMIP5 models have the ability to simulate the spatial-temporal characteristics of the annual mean precipitation in China, and the CMIP5 multi-model mean shows better performance than CMIP3. The multi-model ensemble mean shows better performance on various time scales than a single model. The capabilities of the 6 Chinese models are comparable to those of the foreign models, and FGOALS-g2 and BCC-CSM1-1-m have relatively better performances among them.

Key words: global climate models, precipitation, CMIP5