Cheng Lijing¹, Kevin E Trenberth², John Fasullo², Michael Mayer³, Magdalena Alonso Balmaseda⁴ and Jiang Zhu⁵, (1)Institute of Atmospheric Physics, International Center for Climate and Environment Sciences, Beijing, China, (2)NCAR, Boulder, CO, United States, (3)Department of Meteorology and Geophysics, University of Vienna, Austria, Vienna, Austria, (4)European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, Reading, United Kingdom, (5)Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Beijing, China