A Preliminary Result on the Projection of Sea Surface Temperature in Korean Waters by Regional Climate Coupled Modelling

Abstract

In spite of an increasing demand on the detailed information on climate change, future climate projections for Korean waters have been conducted very limitedly. Even for the regional climate projections, most of the previous studies used a regional ocean-only model forced by a global model projection result for the atmosphere and thus could not properly simulate the air-sea interactions on a high resolution. The goal of this study is to develop a regional climate coupled model (RCCM) for the Northwest Pacific and present a future climate projection in Korean waters with including high-resolution air-sea interaction effects. In this paper, we present preliminary results focusing on sea surface temperature (SST) changes projected for Korean waters using the RCCM developed for the Northwest Pacific. The RCCM consists of an ocean model, Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS) and an atmospheric model, Weather Research Forecast (WRF). The projection results show some prominent features such as a considerable surface warming in the East Sea relative to the Yellow and East China Sea and a stronger warming in summer than in winter. Compared to the ocean-only model result, the RCCM result shows a significant difference in the projected SST, especially in the Yellow Sea, implying that the regional climate modeling allowing air-sea interaction can have a considerable influence on a future climate change projection.