Reproduction and projection of sea level around Korean Peninsula using regional climate ocean model with dynamical downscaling method

Abstract

<p>Recently, the rate of sea level rise in accelerating with time, and many studies have reported that sea level will increase rapidly in the near future. Also, various global ocean climate models are used to predict sea level rise due to global warming. However, most global ocean climate models have low resolutions, so it is hard to explain detailed the ocean phenomena such as sea level and currents around Korean Peninsula. This study aims to past 30-year reproduce and future 100-year predict for rising trend of sea level using Regional Climate Ocean Model (RCOM) with ROMS according to IPCC climate change scenario (RCP 4.5).</p><p>The RCOM with high resolution of 1/20° horizontally and 40 layers vertically has been established for reproduction and long term forecast of sea-level rise in the Northwest Pacific, including marginal seas around Korea. Dynamic downscaling processes using result of the global climate models were applied to the open boundary conditions of our RCOM. To prepare the optimal boundary data for RCOM, the CMIP5 climate model was evaluated to select 4 climate models: IPSL-CM5A-LR, and -MR, NorESM1-M, MPI-ESM-LR.</p><p>Based on the RCOM results of 4 experiments, the rate of sea level rise for IPCC climate change scenario (RCP4.5) around Korean peninsula were 2.52, 2.21, 3.11, 3.36 mm/yr for the last 30 years (1976~2005), and 5.17, 4.99, 5.62, 5.42 mm/yr for the next 100 years (2006~2100), respectively. Ensemble mean value of next 100 years for 4 model results was 5.30 mm/yr. The sea level rise of 4 models for RCP 4.5 were 48, 48, 58, 48 cm for next 100 years, respectively, and ensemble mean value of 4 models was 50 cm during 2006~2100.</p><p>Future studies will focus on predicting the next 100 years of sea level change based on IPCC climate change scenario (RCP2.6, 8.5).</p><p> </p>