Abstract
ABSTRACTPossible future climate change can be projected by general circulation models (GCMs), and the future geographic distribution of global climate zones can be projected based on these GCM simulations. In this study, the performance of 33 GCMs in simulating the distribution of global climate zones was evaluated using Kappa values. The results show that certain models are more skillful than other models in simulating the present distribution of global climate zones. The ensemble mean of all the GCMs showed worse performance than some individual models in simulating the present distribution of climate zones. The ensemble mean based on the three GCMs that showed superior performance achieved the optimum results in simulating the future distribution of climate zones. Based on the simulations of the ensemble mean of these three GCMs, the distributions of global climate zones in the future were projected for three scenarios (Representative Concentration Pathways, RCP) (RCP2.6, RCP4.5, and RCP8.5). The climate types in the temperate zone were susceptible to climate changes under the three scenarios. The shift in the distribution of climate zones was mainly caused by the joint variations of temperature and precipitation among different climate zones.
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