Performance of air temperature from ERA5-Land reanalysis in coastal urban agglomeration of Southeast China

Near-surface air temperature is an important indicator of climate change and extreme events. ERA5-Land reanalysis products feature finer spatial and temporal resolutions, and have been widely adopted in global climate-related research. However, the performance of ERA5-Land air temperature data in coastal urban agglomerations has received little attention. In this study, a comprehensive evaluation is conducted in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area (GBA) using the observations of 1080 automatic weather stations in 2018 as reference. Generally, ERA5-Land underestimates temperature (an average bias of 0.90 °C), and performs better at low temperatures than at high temperatures. At the station level, it is observed that the correlation shows a strong positive linear relationship with the distance to the coastline in summer, and that the bias increases with increasing altitude throughout the year. With respect to different land cover types, data accuracy over urban and built-up lands is the lowest. The spatial pattern of ERA5-Land is generally consistent with that of stations but relatively poor in urban areas. In addition, ERA5-Land properly captures daily and monthly variations, as well as intraday temperature fluctuations. These conclusions provide a reference for the implementation of ERA5-Land in coastal urban agglomerations.