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Variability of hydrological extreme events in East Asia and their dynamical control: a comparison between observations and two high-resolution global climate models

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Abstract

This work investigates the variability of extreme weather events (drought spells, DS15, and daily heavy rainfall, PR99) over East Asia. It particularly focuses on the large scale atmospheric circulation associated with high levels of the occurrence of these extreme events. Two observational datasets (APHRODITE and PERSIANN) are compared with two high-resolution global climate models (HiRAM and HadGEM3-GC2) and an ensemble of other lower resolution climate models from CMIP5. We first evaluate the performance of the high resolution models. They both exhibit good skill in reproducing extreme events, especially when compared with CMIP5 results. Significant differences exist between the two observational datasets, highlighting the difficulty of having a clear estimate of extreme events. The link between the variability of the extremes and the large scale circulation is investigated, on monthly and interannual timescales, using composite and correlation analyses. Both extreme indices DS15 and PR99 are significantly linked to the low level wind intensity over East Asia, i.e. the monsoon circulation. It is also found that DS15 events are strongly linked to the surface temperature over the Siberian region and to the land-sea pressure contrast, while PR99 events are linked to the sea surface temperature anomalies over the West North Pacific. These results illustrate the importance of the monsoon circulation on extremes over East Asia. The dependencies on of the surface temperature over the continent and the sea surface temperature raise the question as to what extent they could affect the occurrence of extremes over tropical regions in future projections.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Consortium for Climate Change Study (CCliCS) - Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), Taiwan, under Grant MOST 100-2119-M-001-029-MY5, and by the UK-China Research and Innovation Partnership Fund through the Met Office Climate Science for Service Partnership (CSSP) China as part of the Newton Fund. We are grateful for the National Center for High-performance Computing (NCHC) for computer time and facilities. We deeply thank the two anonymous reviewers that helped us to build a stronger paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Center for Environmental Changes, Academia Sinica, Taipei, 105, Taiwan

    N. Freychet, C.-H. Wu, C.-A. Chen, H.-H. Hsu & C.-Y. Tu

  2. National Oceanography Centre European Way, Southampton, SO14 3ZH, UK

    A. Duchez, J. Hirschi, A. Forryan, B. Sinha & A. L. New

  3. Hadley Centre, Met Office, Exeter, EX1 3PB, UK

    T. Graham & M. B. Andrews

  4. NOAA/Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    S.-J. Lin

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  1. N. Freychet
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  2. A. Duchez
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  3. C.-H. Wu
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  4. C.-A. Chen
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  5. H.-H. Hsu
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  9. A. L. New
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  13. S.-J. Lin
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Freychet, N., Duchez, A., Wu, CH. et al. Variability of hydrological extreme events in East Asia and their dynamical control: a comparison between observations and two high-resolution global climate models. Clim Dyn 48, 745–766 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-016-3108-5

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