Abstract
CR Climate Research Contact the journal Facebook Twitter RSS Mailing List Subscribe to our mailing list via Mailchimp HomeLatest VolumeAbout the JournalEditorsSpecials CR 64:141-158 (2015) - DOI: https://doi.org/10.3354/cr01302 Assessment of precipitation climatology in an ensemble of CORDEX-East Asia regional climate simulations Bo Huang*, Stefan Polanski, Ulrich Cubasch Institute of Meteorology, Freie Universität Berlin, Carl-Heinrich-Becker-Weg 6-10, 12165 Berlin, Germany *Corresponding author: huangb@zedat.fu-berlin.de ABSTRACT: An ensemble of regional climate simulations from the Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment in East Asia (CORDEX-East Asia) was analysed to evaluate the ability of 5 regional climate models (RCMs) and their ensemble mean in reproducing the key features of present-day precipitation (1989-2008). We emphasised (1) an extreme rainfall event, (2) seasonal climatology, (3) annual cycles and inter-annual variability and (4) the monsoon characteristics. We highlighted 4 sub-monsoon regions, viz. South Asian Summer Monsoon (SAS), the East Asian Summer Monsoon (EAS), the Western North Pacific Tropical Monsoon (WNP) and the Australian-Maritime Continent Monsoon (AUSMC). We found that the RCMs showed a reasonable performance to capture the extreme rainfall event in 1998. The RCMs simulated the seasonal mean, annual cycle and inter-annual variability acceptably. However, individual models exhibited significant biases in some sub-regions and seasons. Moreover, most of the RCMs significantly improved their performance in capturing precipitation climatology and monsoon characteristics over the Korean Peninsula, the Korea Strait and southern Japan. Based upon this performance study, we conclude that the present set of RCMs from CORDEX can be used to provide useful information on climate projections over East Asia. KEY WORDS: CORDEX-East Asia · Regional climate model · Ensemble simulations · Precipitation climatology · Monsoon characteristics Full text in pdf format PreviousNextCite this article as: Huang B, Polanski S, Cubasch U (2015) Assessment of precipitation climatology in an ensemble of CORDEX-East Asia regional climate simulations. Clim Res 64:141-158. https://doi.org/10.3354/cr01302 Export citation RSS - Facebook - Tweet - linkedIn Cited by Published in CR Vol. 64, No. 2. Online publication date: July 29, 2015 Print ISSN: 0936-577X; Online ISSN: 1616-1572 Copyright © 2015 Inter-Research.
Highlights
Recent climate change and its feedback to human activities have become increasingly important, especially in monsoon regions (IPCC 2013)
The Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP), the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) and the ERA-Interim showed much better consistency, some significant differences were still evident at smaller spatial scales
We presented a first evaluation of the precipitation climatology based upon an ensemble of regional climate models (RCMs) simulations performed within the CORDEX-EA project
Summary
Recent climate change and its feedback to human activities have become increasingly important, especially in monsoon regions (IPCC 2013). Following the modelling framework of the CORDEX project, the simulations are driven by ERA-Interim re-analysis data (1989−2008) at the lower and lateral boundaries, and are integrated over East Asia (Fig. 1) with a spatial horizontal resolution of 0.44° (~50 km). For model evaluation of precipitation climatology and monsoon characteristics, the Asian Precipitation-Highly-Resolved Observational Data Integration Towards Evaluation of the Water Resources (APHRODITE; Yatagai et al 2009), the Climatic Research Unit (CRU; Harris et al 2014), the Global Precipitation Climatology Centre (GPCC; Schneider et al 2014), the Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP; Adler et al 2003), the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM; Huffman et al 2007) and the ERA-Interim re-analysis datasets were used (Table 2). Reference Yatagai et al (2009) Harris et al (2014) Dee et al (2011) Schneider et al (2014) Adler et al (2003) Huffman et al (2007)
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