Abstract: Long term（1958-12—2001-11）climate simulations over China by both PRECIS and RegCM3, with the same configuration of boundary and initial conditions, domain and horizontal resolution, were carried out, so as to analyze and compare the two models simulation capacity for climatology and interannual variability of temperature and precipitation over China. The principal conclusions were given as follows. Both models performed well in simulating the spatial distribution features of annual mean temperature. However, there was about 1.5℃ of warm bias for PRECIS while 0.8℃ of cold bias for RegCM3, a mean 2～3℃ difference could be found between the two models. The models could also well reproduce the inter annual variability of temperature, but compared with observation, there were still some differences about the location and intensity of variability centre in the simulated results of the two models. As for the annual precipitation and the corresponding interannual variability, both PRECIS and RegCM3 had certain simulation capacity.Compared with RegCM3, PRECIS was more consistent with observations in terms of the simulated location and intensity of heavy precipitation centre and areas with larger variability.

Key words: Regional climate model, PRECIS, RegCM3, Model inter comparison