Paper Reviewed
Wenting, H.U. and Renguang, W.U. 2015. Relationship between South China Sea precipitation variability and tropical Indo-Pacific SST anomalies in IPCC CMIP5 models during spring-to-summer transition. Advances in Atmospheric Sciences 32: 1303-1318.

In their recent enlightening publication, Wenting and Renguang describe how they evaluated "the precipitation variability over the South China Sea (SCS) and its relationship to tropical Indo-Pacific sea surface temperature anomalies [SSTAs] during the spring-to-summer transition (April-May-Jun, AMJ) simulated by 23 coupled models." And what did they thereby learn?

The two Chinese scientists report that based on an inter-model Empirical Orthogonal Function introduced by Li and Xie (2012 and 2014), "the leading model biases in the SCS feature [1] excessive precipitation and [2] warmer SST in the central SCS, with [3] an anomalous cyclonic circulation." Furthermore, as they continue, "[4] deficient precipitation and [5] colder SST in the EP is detected as the leading model bias mode, plus negative SSTA over [6] the SCS, [7] the northern Indian Ocean, and [8] the northwest of Australia."

As a result of these several anomalous findings, Wenting and Renguang rightly conclude that "further work remains to be conducted to unravel the specific reasons for the discrepancies between models and observations in various aspects."

References
Li, G. and Xie, S.-P. 2012. Origins of tropical-wide SST biases in CMIP multi-model ensembles. Geophysical Research Letters 39: 10.1029/2012GL053777.

Li, G. and Xie, S.-P. 2014. Tropical biases in CMIP5 multi-model ensemble: The excessive equatorial Pacific cold tongue and double ITCZ problems. Journal of Climate 27: 1765-1780.