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Spatiotemporal characteristics of heat waves over China in regional climate simulations within the CORDEX-EA project

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Abstract

Using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, this paper analyzes the spatiotemporal features of heat waves in 20-year regional climate simulations over East Asia, and investigates the capability of WRF to reproduce observational heat waves in China. Within the framework of the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX), the WRF model is driven by the ERA-Interim (ERAIN) reanalysis, and five continuous simulations are conducted from 1989 to 2008. Of these, four runs apply the interior spectral nudging (SN) technique with different wavenumbers, nudging variables and nudging coefficients. Model validations show that WRF can reasonably reproduce the spatiotemporal features of heat waves in China. Compared with the experiment without SN, the application of SN is effectie on improving the skill of the model in simulating both the spatial distributions and temporal variations of heat waves of different intensities. The WRF model shows advantages in reproducing the synoptic circulations with SN and therefore yields better representations for heat wave events. Besides, the SN method is able to preserve the variability of large-scale circulations quite well, which in turn adjusts the extreme temperature variability towards the observation. Among the four SN experiments, those with stronger nudging coefficients perform better in modulating both the spatial and temporal features of heat waves. In contrast, smaller nudging coefficients weaken the effects of SN on improving WRF’s performances.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2017YFA0603803 and 2016YFA0600303) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41375075, 91425304 and 41775074). The numerical calculations in this paper have been done on the computing facilities in the High Performance Computing Center (HPCC) of Nanjing University. The authors also acknowledge with thanks the ECMWF for providing the ERA-interim reanalysis data as driving fields in the simulations. And we declare that we have no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Atmospheric Sciences, Nanjing University, 163 Xianlin Road, Nanjing, 210023, China

    Pinya Wang, Jianping Tang, Xuguang Sun & Fang Juan

  2. Key Laboratory of Mesoscale Severe Weather/Ministry of Education, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210023, China

    Pinya Wang, Jianping Tang & Fang Juan

  3. CMA-NJU Joint Laboratory for Climate Prediction Studies, Institute for Climate and Global Change Research, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210023, China

    Pinya Wang, Jianping Tang & Xuguang Sun

  4. Ningbo Meteorological Observatory, Ningbo, 315012, China

    Jianyong Liu

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  1. Pinya Wang
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Correspondence to Jianping Tang or Xuguang Sun.

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Wang, P., Tang, J., Sun, X. et al. Spatiotemporal characteristics of heat waves over China in regional climate simulations within the CORDEX-EA project. Clim Dyn 52, 799–818 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-018-4167-6

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