Abstract
In this study, the effects of climate change on precipitation and the maximum daily temperature (Tmax) at two USA locations that have different climates—the Travis Airforce Base (AFB) in California [38.27° N, 121.93° W] and Fort Bragg (FBR) in North Carolina [35.14 N, 79.00 W]—are analyzed. The effects of climate change on central tendency, tail distributions, and both auto- and cross-covariance structures in precipitation and Tmax fields for three time periods in the 21st century centered on the years 2020, 2050, and 2100 were analyzed. It was found that, on average, Tmax under the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 4.5 emission scenario is projected to increase for the years 2020, 2050, and 2100 by 1.1, 2.0, and 2.2 °C, respectively, for AFB, and 0.9, 1.2, and 1.6 °C, respectively, for FBR, while under the RCP8.5 emission scenario Tmax will increase by 1.1, 1.9, and 2.7 °C, respectively, for AFB, and 0.1, 1.5, and 2.2 °C, respectively, for FBR. The climate change signal in precipitation is weak. The results show that, under different emission scenarios, events considered to be within 1% of the most extreme events in the past will become ~13–30 times more frequent for Tmax, ~and 0.05–3 times more frequent for precipitation in both locations. Several analytical methods were deployed in a sequence, creating an easily scalable framework for similar analyses in the future.
Highlights
Accurate future climate modeling is beneficial for a range of reasons, from gaining a fundamental understanding of the Earth system to gaining a regional or domain-specific understanding of climate change consequences, both of which enable the expansion of planning capabilities
This study focuses on the effect of climate change in the 21st century on local military infrastructure, the Travis Airforce Base (AFB), in California (38.27◦ N, 121.93◦ W], and Fort Bragg (FBR), in North Carolina [35.14◦ N, 79.00◦ W])
For example, model CESM1-CAM5 shows that its past modeled precipitation probability distribution functions (PDFs) is similar to the observations (Figure 2a), but for all three future periods under the RCP8.5 emission scenario (Figure 2b–d) the modeled precipitation PDF differs greatly from the PDF of observations in the baseline period
Summary
Accurate future climate modeling is beneficial for a range of reasons, from gaining a fundamental understanding of the Earth system to gaining a regional or domain-specific understanding of climate change consequences, both of which enable the expansion of planning capabilities. There are three major challenges faced by future climate change studies when it comes to local and regional scales: (1) a large number of possible climate model/emission scenario combinations,. Previous studies found that the simulation ensemble performed better than the individual models when a broad range of historical climate metrics were considered [10]. The range in emissions scenarios and climate model responses [11,12,13] provide far too many simulations
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