Abstract:Based on the observation and simulation results about surface temperature and precipitation derived from the outputs of coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation models participating in the IPCC AR4, the assessment of global models' simulation capabilities in East Asia continent has been done by the methods of multi-model ensembles according to different horizontal resolution of atmospheric model. The results are as follows: (1) the results of high, medium, low resolution models and ensemble of all models (referred to Ⅰ,Ⅱ,Ⅲ,Ⅳ Ensemble respectively) are able to reproduce the increasing trend of temperature from 1901 to 1999 and the linear trend of Ⅱ Ensemble is closer to the observed temperature than that of other results, but the interannual variability of all four ensemble results is smaller than that of observation. (2) The four ensemble results can also accurately simulate the monthly variation and spatial distribution characteristic of temperature from 1980 to 1999, but the simulation value is lower than the observation. In addition, the Ⅰ Ensemble's error compared to the observation's is the least. (3) There is a significant deviation in simulation results of time evolution characteristics of precipitation, so the simulation uncertainty about precipitation is obvious. (4) The four ensemble results can reproduce spatial distribution characteristic of precipitation from 1980 to 1999, and the I Ensemble's error compared to the observation's is the least. However, the simulation value is higher than the observation's. Therefore, the I Ensemble has no advantage on the simulation of temporal variation for temperature and precipitation, but the simulation performance of spatial variation is obviously better than that of the other three ways.