Measurement Biases Explain Discrepancies between the Observed and Simulated Decadal Variability of Surface Incident Solar Radiation

Observations have reported a widespread dimming of surface incident solar radiation (R(s)) from the 1950s to the 1980s and a brightening afterwards. However, none of the state-of-the-art earth system models, including those from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5), could successfully reproduce the dimming/brightening rates over China. We find that the decadal variability of observed R(s) may have important errors due to instrument sensitivity drifting and instrument replacement. While sunshine duration (SunDu), which is a robust measurement related to R(s), is nearly free from these problems. We estimate R(s) from SunDu with a method calibrated by the observed R(s) at each station. SunDu-derived R(s) declined over China by −2.8 (with a 95% confidence interval of −1.9 to −3.7) W m(−2) per decade from 1960 to 1989, while the observed R(s) declined by −8.5 (with a 95% confidence interval of −7.3 to −9.8) W m(−2) per decade. The former trend was duplicated by some high-quality CMIP5 models, but none reproduced the latter trend.