Advance in application of regional climate models in China

Abstract

Regional climate models have become the powerful tools for simulating regional climate and its change process and have been widely used in China. Using regional climate models, some research results have been obtained on the following aspects: 1) the numerical simulation of East Asian monsoon climate, including exceptional monsoon precipitation, summer precipitation distribution, East Asian circulation, multi-year climate average condition, summer rain belt and so on; 2) the simulation of arid climate of the western China, including thermal effect of the Qing- hai-Tibet Plateau, the plateau precipitation in the Qilian Mountains; and the impacts of greenhouse effects (CO2 dou- bling) upon climate in the western China; and 3) the simulation of the climate effect of underlying surface changes, in- cluding the effect of soil on climate formation, the influence of terrain on precipitation, the effect of regional soil deg- radation on regional climate, the effect of various underlying surfaces on regional climate, the effect of land-sea con- trast on the climate formulation, the influence of snow cover over the plateau regions on the regional climate, the effect of vegetation changes on the regional climate, etc. In the process of application of regional climate models, the prefer- ences of the models are improved so that better simulation results are gotten. At last, some suggestions are made about the application of regional climate models in regional climate research in the future.